


le portrait sans retouches

by 26stars



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - A Star is Born (2018) Fusion, Alternate Universe - Popstar, F/F, Melinda's not in a good place but she's not going to stay there, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, References to Addiction, References to Depression, References to death of a family member, References to rehab/recovery, Rehab, Rising Star!Daisy Johnson, Songwriting, Superstar!Melinda May, THIS IS NOT GOING TO HAVE THE SAME ENDING AS THE MOVIE I PROMISE, is still a plot point though, references to death of a significant other, so if that's not for you then maybe pass on this one
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2020-05-12 09:03:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 27,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19225978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/26stars/pseuds/26stars
Summary: Melinda May is a worldwide superstar struggling with more than a few things behind the scenes. Daisy is an amateur songwriter struggling to get into the spotlight. When their paths cross at an open mic night, a world of possibilities is born.*A Star Is Born AU(without the Star is Born ending)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AwesomeKickAss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AwesomeKickAss/gifts).



> *Mushu rising from the smoke gif* I LIIIIIVE!
> 
> So I wanted this to be a oneshot but nothing's changed with me and it got to long and now it's going to be a (short for me) multichap. I said it in the tags and the summary but I'll say it again, this fic will NOT have the ending of the movie (any of the star is born versions). Promise. 
> 
> This one's for Bo, for being a great pal and cheerleader over the years, and because I was thinking of you every time I rewatched Gaga's Vie en Rose scene :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those just starting this fic (or rereading), I originally didn't know how much this fic would deviate from the movie's plot apart from the ending, but now (working on chapter 5), I see that really the only similar events are their first meeting and their first time on stage together. Swapping in these two for the Ally and Jack of the movie change dynamics a lot, and I was determined to make their relationship feel more equal and less coercive if it was the last thing I did. 
> 
> So, if you liked the movie, this is your heads up, if you didn't like the movie, maybe you'll like this better ;)

Melinda’s head is pounding as she strides off the stage, the cheers of her sold-out audience and the last chords of her encore performance still ringing in her ears. She grabs the first bottle of water offered to her and takes a long drink, not breaking her stride or making eye contact with any of her dancers or crew on the way to her dressing room. Once alone behind the door, she presses her hands into the granite of the vanity counter and exhales, leaning against the cool glass of the mirror and soaking in its soothing touch on her damp skin.

_Don’t do it. You don’t need it._

That annoying voice always surfaces when her head starts throbbing like this. She knows exactly where in the room the (easy) solution to all of this is…

She makes herself change her clothes instead.

Once she’s redressed in her usual ensemble of black jeans, a cotton button-down, and her favorite leather jacket, she scrounges for her phone and throws it in her bag. She needs three wipes to get off all the stage makeup, and then she splashes water on her face. Her head is still throbbing as she towels herself off again, and this time, she gets as far as opening the lowest drawer of the makeup table and staring at the bottle she’d hidden there earlier that day.

 _You don’t need it,_ she tells herself once again.

 _But you deserve it,_ a taunting voice whispers back.

Melinda kicks the drawer shut and makes for the door.

Outside her dressing room, the usual post-show chaos is still in full swing, but no one approaches her except her assistant, on task as always with her Bluetooth headset over one ear and tablet tucked under one arm.

“Great job tonight,” Bobbi says, falling in step beside her and passing her a card key. “You’re all checked in at the hotel, your bag’s up in the room, and Hunter is waiting with an SUV in the loading bay. The flight to Phoenix is scheduled for 11:25 tomorrow morning, and you have a working dinner scheduled with Jeff tomorrow evening at 7.”

“Okay,” Melinda says tonelessly, following Bobbi down the back stair towards the loading bay. “Any word yet on the Portland booking?”

“Not yet. But I’m sure it’s just a matter of time. Your show there sold out within two hours of ticket sales going live—they have to know they’d be missing a huge opportunity not to add a night.”

“Okay. Text when you hear.”

They’re out in the chaos of the garage by then, where packing cases are already being rolled out towards the stage to strike the set and equipment. It’s the last leg of her United States tour, and Melinda isn’t ashamed to admit that she’s counting down the days until she can spend an uninterrupted month at home alone. As much as she loves performing, it’s draining on its best days and exhausting on the worst. The noise, the adrenaline, and the busyness help keep old ghosts quiet though, and the money’s not bad, either.

She sees Hunter ahead of them, chatting with a stagehand who is probably supposed to be working, but he immediately cuts the conversation short when he sees Melinda and Bobbi approaching.

“Crown Plaza on Fifth and Western,” Bobbi reminds him unnecessarily as he opens the back door of the SUV, and Melinda climbs inside.

“Yes ma’am,” he responds with only a slight smirk at his wife.

“Don’t celebrate too hard,” Bobbi says, catching the door when Hunter tries to shut it and giving Melinda a knowing look.

“I’ll get her home safely,” Hunter says, trying to step in again, but Bobbi plants herself like a tree. He’s never stood a chance.

“Melinda?” she says expectantly, but Melinda doesn’t look at her when she finally answers.

“I heard you.”

Bobbi steps away, disappointment audible in her silence, and Hunter closes the door.

Melinda waits until their car is two lights away from the event center before she pulls the bottle out of the pocket in the back of the driver’s seat.

~

Daisy slams the door of her van and hustles for the back entrance to the bar, squeezing past the greasy wall and managing not to get any of the grime on her work uniform, which she’s still wearing. As she hefts the metal door open and hurries into the bright chaos of the makeshift dressing room, she immediately catches sight of her best friend attempting to zip up her dark red dress reminiscent of Jessica Rabbit's.

“I gotcha, babe,” Daisy says, dropping her bag on the makeup table’s stool and slipping around Jemma to finish zipping her up.

“Thanks, love. Rosalind keep you late?” Jemma says, acknowledging Daisy’s sweaty, just-off-the-clock appearance.

“When does she not?” Daisy says, hastily unzipping her duffle and extracting her own dress. “Who’s on stage now?”

“Trip,” Jemma answers, leaning close to the mirror to apply another coat of mascara. “Meaning you’ve got all of twenty more minutes before you’re up.”

“ _Jesus_ ,” Daisy mutters, stripping off her shirt and slacks and grabbing the lingerie to go with her dress. “Well, sorry to miss your act! Break a leg, Jemma!”

"You too, Daisy!" Jemma says with a grin as she throws down the mascara and hustles away, pulling on her elbow gloves as she disappears out the door. 

~

The bottle wasn’t full enough to calm the pounding in her head, so Melinda is lying back listlessly in her seat, counting the minutes until they arrive at the hotel.

“Some kind of wreck up there?” she eventually asks, once she noticed they haven’t moved past this block for well over five minutes.

“Must be—can’t see it, though,” Hunter says from behind the wheel, sounding apologetic.

Melinda sighs, swiveling around to check behind them. Every lane on the street is packed with cars idling impatiently—the only way out is through. They appear to be on some kind of boulevard, with neon-lit signs flanking the cattle drive of vehicles. Getting out and walking to the hotel won’t be any faster than driving, of that she’s sure, but Melinda’s head is still pounding, and the anxiety makes her reckless enough.

“Tell you what, Hunter,” she says, reaching for her bag and extracting her phone and a wad of hundred-dollar bills, which she stuffs in her jeans pocket. “Once you get through this gridlock, get to a place where you can idle for a few minutes and call me. I’m going to go kill some time.”

“Mel, Bob won’t be happy—”

Melinda is already out of the car and slamming the door before she hears the rest of it.

There are knots of young people outside each of the bars on the street, making it hard to gauge which one will be the least crowded, so Melinda simply approaches the one with the least bass bleeding through the front door—she’s had enough of that for one night. There’s no one checking ID’s, but there is a young man standing just inside the door talking to a young woman with dark curls and a blood-red backless dress. He meets Melinda’s eyes over the small woman’s head, glances back down at his conversation partner, then suddenly does the double-take Melinda is used to receiving. She ducks her head, but not before the man has spun his date by her shoulders to look in Melinda’s direction.

“Oh my god, isn’t that—”

She weaves through the crowd in the direction of the bar, but the couple beats her to it shooing one of the customers out of a barstool.

“Fitz, oh my god, _move_ —don’t you see who that is?”

A short, pale man with tightly-curled brown hair is practically lifted out of his seat by the man from the door and Melinda is lightly guided by the girl into his place.

“Oh goodness, please sit down,” the red-dressed girl is saying in a British accent while the young man hollers to the bartender to put anything Melinda orders on his own tab.

“That’s not necessary—” she tries to say, but she’s drowned out when the woman on the small stage on the opposite wall finishes her song and the customers break into raucous applause.

“Oh wonderful, this is my friend up next!” the British girl exclaims, clapping her velvet-gloved hands and seeming to forget about Melinda for a moment. Melinda manages to order a Scotch whiskey neat before swiveling in her chair to see the emcee assume the stage as the last singer steps off.

“Our next performance tonight is one of our very own—she used to work here as a server, but tonight, she’s serving nothing but fabulous French vocals. Please welcome—Daisy Johnson!”

Patrons clap and cheer as the lights go down to a cool blue, and a figure in a black dress and fishnet stockings takes the stage. Melinda hears a familiar opening chord, and the woman beneath the spotlight begins the opening lines of a French tune Melinda knows well.

 _In fact…_ she listens closer to the backing playing over the bar’s sound system. _Yep, that’s_ my _recording of_ La Vie en Rose _she’s singing…_

Her drink arrives, but Melinda can’t look away from the dark-haired singer as she makes her way across the room while delivering the song to a more-than-appreciative audience. Her voice is remarkably strong, and she has impressive confidence for someone who seems to be completely sober. Strategically-placed roses in her outfit become gifts for her adoring fans, and she seems to fill up every corner of the room with her presence without ever losing track of the song.

Before the second verse, the young woman actually hoists herself up onto the bar, singing several lines while approaching Melinda’s area, step by careful step. The bartender seems to have been warned in advance to move all the glasses out of the way, and at the corner, almost directly in front of Melinda, she suddenly lies gracefully down, plucking a last rose from her garter and offering it to the girl in the red dress, who kisses the singer's hand after she takes it. The singer—Daisy—meets Melinda’s eyes briefly as she grabs a deep breath between phrases, and Melinda guesses that curly-haired man from before is who this girl expected to see, because she looks only confused rather than star-struck at the sight of Melinda in the chair next to her head.

But then the moment is past, and the woman is rising to her feet again, belting out the final lines as she slips gracefully off the bar and makes her way back to the stage, striking a dramatic pose in a chair on the last note. Melinda claps along with the audience as the young woman stands and takes a small, sheepish bow, but it’s not until the British woman grabs her by the arm that Melinda realizes she’s also grinning widely.

“Oh my god, isn’t she great? You _have_ to meet her! She’ll be so excited!” the young girl is chirping, and Melinda doesn’t resist at all as the woman pulls her from her seat and drags her in what she guesses is the direction of the dressing rooms.

Abandoned on the bar next to her unsipped Scotch, Melinda’s phone suddenly starts ringing.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This feels like a bit of a filler chapter, but the next scene was getting kind of long, so I split it up here.

The dressing room is crowded again, most of the other women already packing it up for the night and swapping out their stage outfits for something a little more comfortable. Daisy, second-to-last on the program for the evening, has barely managed to make her way through the crowd back to the makeup table where she left her bag and a bottle of water when the volume of the room abruptly skyrockets, and she turns toward the chaos. All the other girls are flocking towards the door, and from within the crowd, Daisy catches the sound of her best friend’s voice.

“Don’t crowd—be polite!” she scolds, and Daisy’s brow furrows as she turns towards the mirror again, plucks a makeup wipe from the package on the counter, and begins wiping the bulk of her overdone eye makeup off.

“Daisy, you were magnificent!” she hears Jemma trill from behind her, sees her approaching in the mirror as she finally breaks free of the crowd. “And Daisy, oh my god, turn around, look who else saw you sing!”

Swiveling on the stool, Daisy looks in the direction of Jemma’s gesture and sees the crowd of fellow performers are clustered around a dark-haired woman who has barely made it through the door. Squinting, Daisy catches a glimpse of the woman’s face as she continues to sign autographs and smile for selfies, and when her brain processes the sight, she nearly tumbles off her stool.

“Is that…”

“Yes! And she saw you sing and she seemed so impressed and—”

“Oh my god…” Daisy mutters, turning back towards the mirror, feeling herself already blushing.

_Be cool, Daisy; Jesus, be cool…_

“So this is her, this is my friend, Daisy Johnson,” Jemma says behind her a moment later, and Daisy takes a deep breath before turning to face the pair.

Melinda May in person is much shorter than she looks on stage, but she has the same enviable waves in her hair and the same cool confidence in every step. Daisy doesn’t stand up as Jemma makes the introduction and Melinda shakes her hand, but one of the other girls produces a free chair and practically shoves the star into it. Daisy tries to smile, but she finds it easier to face the mirror, ostensibly to continue removing her makeup, rather than face the presence of greatness at her elbow.

“It’s great to meet you—I’m such a huge fan! What brings you into this dive tonight?”

Melinda smiles a little. “I just finished a show around here, but traffic was bad on the way to the hotel, so I ditched the car. My driver’s probably still sitting in the same gridlock.”

_Her speaking voice is so different than her singing voice…_

“Oh yeah? How’d your show go?”

Daisy hopes she sounds as cool as she’s trying to appear.

Melinda shrugs. “I think it went all right.”

They are interrupted by another pair of girls brought in from the bar to see the star, and Daisy wipes off her dark lipstick while Melinda signs several napkins, one collarbone, and three forearms. There is only a break in the action when Maria, apparently alerted to the fire code violation taking place in the dressing room, enters and shoos the crowd out herself, barely needing to raise her voice.

“You want to sing tomorrow night, you get out in that bar and wait your turn to talk to her,” the bar owner says, herding the other women (including Jemma) out with a single glance back in Daisy’s direction.

_You good?_

Daisy catches her eye and shrugs. _We’ll see._

Melinda lets out a breath as the door closes and silence suddenly descends in the room. Now alone with the woman, Daisy can’t quite keep the blush from creeping up her cheeks again.  

“Why did you come back here?” she asks, hearing the quiver of nerves in her own voice as she glances at the star.

Melinda’s lips turn up marginally. “I saw you sing and couldn’t stop smiling. Your friend brought me back here to meet you. And I’m glad she did.”

Daisy meets her eyes cautiously, thrilled but also slightly suspicious.

“Can I buy you a drink?” the singer offers, and Daisy exhales slightly, those words, at least, finally coming easy.

“I don’t drink,” she answers, slipping off her high heels and tucking them back into her duffle.

“Really?” Melinda says with a pointed glance around at the half-empty bottles and glasses filling several surfaces around the room.

Daisy shrugs in acknowledgement but remains firm. “Really,” she says, pulling her jeans from the bag and getting to her feet. “But I missed dinner. So I’ll eat with you, if you want to hang out.”

She meets Melinda’s eyes, feeling like she’s offering a challenge. The older woman gazes steadily at her for a moment before nodding and getting to her feet.

“I’ll wait for you,” she says with a glance at Daisy’s clothes in her hands, smiling briefly at her before turning back towards the dressing room door.

~

Someone, probably the owner, has put a bouncer in place near the dressing room door, but that doesn’t stop the volume of the bar from increasing noticeably as soon as Melinda steps into sight. Before the fans reach her though, the young man who first spotted Melinda at the door steps between her and the crowd, holding out Melinda’s cell phone.

“Someone’s blowing up your phone tonight,” he says, and Melinda curses as she unlocks the screen to see eight missed calls from Hunter. Stepping back behind the protective presence of the bouncer, Melinda dials back and brings her phone to her ear.

“Melinda, Jesus, where have you gone to?” Hunter says immediately as he answers in the middle of the first ring. “I’m idling around the corner from where you got out and these cops aren’t going to let me wait here much longer.”

“Sorry—left my phone on the bar,” she says, pushing her hair back tiredly. “I’ll be out there in a minute, plus one…”

She trails off as the dressing room door opens, and Daisy leans out, shouldering her duffle.

“Where are you parked?” Melinda says then, but as Hunter starts explaining, Daisy shakes her head and holds up her keys.

“I’m driving,” she says decisively. “He can follow us if you want him to, though.”

Melinda considers her for a moment, surprised by the girl’s boldness. But when Hunter nags in her ear again, it makes the decision easy.

“Hey Hunter, take the night off. And tell your wife it was my idea.”

She hangs up before she can hear any of his protests and turns her phone off.

Daisy smirks slightly as she holds the dressing room door open a little wider. “We can take the back exit. My van’s in the alley.”

The dressing room is empty as Melinda follows Daisy through it and out into the back lot of the bar. A few spots now stand open, but the girl leads her around one side to the alley with the dumpsters, where a sky-blue van is parked in the narrow space. Daisy unlocks the front passenger door for her and hits the power lock, sliding open the back door next to toss in her duffle. Melinda catches sight of a blanket-covered air mattress in place of the usual rows of rear seats, along with a few baskets of packaged food and clothes, but she waits until Daisy has started the engine and pulled onto the main road before she says anything about it.

“You live in here?” Melinda asks, glancing in the driver’s direction.

“Yep,” Daisy says easily, avoiding her eyes.

“How long?”

This time, the girl sighs minutely. “Coming up on three years.”

“Wow. How do you get away with that?”

Daisy shrugs. “I’ve been here for most of it. California’s pretty accommodating of car-living. Beaches and national parks usually won’t kick sleepers out. It may not be the roomiest lifestyle, but it’s cheaper than renting a place.”

“And what’s your day job?” Melinda asks, trying to remember what gas costs these days…

Daisy makes a turn at the intersection before answering. “I have a few different ones. I work full-time in a diner a few blocks from the bar, and I moonlight as a freelance computer programmer and web designer. Sometimes I babysit my friends’ kids too, but that usually only works out of they are wanting to go out in the evenings.”

“And somewhere in there, you have time to sing,” Melinda adds.

“Well, that’s the crust the pie is built on,” Daisy says with a brief flash of a grin. “But I don’t get paid unless I play at the boardwalk. And it’s usually not worth running the risk of being caught out there without a performance license.”

At the next red light, Daisy faces Melinda. “Sorry, I’ve just been headed for In-n-Out, but I didn’t ask if that was all right with you…”

“Sounds great,” Melinda says quickly. “Whatever you want. It’s on me.”

“Burgers it is,” Daisy says with a grin, turning into the restaurant up ahead.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Twelve notes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so in rewatching the film to figure out the structure I want to go with for this fic, it's almost comical (sarcasm) how swapping in a woman like May for a self-centered dude changes the dynamic in several scenes. Also letting Daisy have more conviction than Ally does in the film (and letting other characters Respect Her No...) would make several things play out differently. 
> 
> This chapter does include mentions of alcoholism, recovery/rehab, homicide, and death of family members. Consider yourself warned. 
> 
> Alcoholism is a real thing for way too many people, and I don't want to use it as a throwaway plot point. I don't have personal experience with it, and have been lucky to not have a loved one struggle with it, but I am trying to research it as well as possible. If you do know from experience though and see something glaringly inaccurate in my fic, please don't be afraid to say so.

She’s not sure what she was expecting Melinda May to be like offstage, but Daisy is more than a little surprised by how quiet and reserved the woman seems. Though she can’t possibly be oblivious to the amazed gape of the girl behind the counter in the fast-food restaurant, Melinda just quietly adds her order to Daisy’s and hands over a hundred dollar bill to pay. When they turn away, Daisy catches the worker raising a cell phone and shoots her a glare, but the younger woman is clearly too excited to look ashamed as she snaps a photo. Melinda doesn’t react, but Daisy doubts she missed the moment.

Back in the car with fountain drinks and a to-go sack in hand, Daisy hesitates before turning on the engine.

“If you’re up for it, there’s an overlook out east that I sleep at some nights—it has a really nice view of the city and it’s always quiet. We could go eat out there if you want…”

The unclear rules of this encounter hang in the air around her. Daisy is certainly trying her utmost to act perfectly calm, but she really has no idea what she’s doing.

_Is this a date? An interview? An audition?_

But whatever it is, the singer seems unworried about the idea of being driven to a deserted area outside the city by a total stranger.

_She’s awfully confident for a tiny woman without a bodyguard…_

“I’m down, but these fries might be gone before we get out of the city,” Melinda says, extracting her order--the largest container of fries on the menu.

“Well pass mine over now then, before you ruin the evening,” Daisy says with what she hopes is a friendly laugh, noticing how their fingers brush as Melinda passes the container over.

“Don’t touch my burgers either,” Daisy threatens as she tucks the warm sleeve of fries between her thighs on the seat and turns on the engine again.

Melinda is quiet for part of the ride, clearly enjoying her own food, but her first subsequent question surprises Daisy.

“Is that a guitar back there?”

She glances over and sees Melinda gazing into backseat area, the capsule that has been her home for the past three years, and Daisy sighs.

“Yeah. It’s nothing fancy. Just some beginner’s six-string, not even nice enough to have a brand name on it.”

“Who taught you how to play?”

Daisy considers lying, then decides she has nothing to lose when she has nothing to offer anyway.

“Another girl in the group home I was in as a teenager.”

Memories of Tess float up uninvited—the run-down rec room at the NYC group home where she had spent her final years under state care, the stained beanbags, broken foosball table, and grimy industrial carpet. The guitar had been a donation and had been already in a sad state when it arrived, but Tess, a somewhat recent addition herself to the group home, had immediately taken charge of it. No one fought her for it—no one else could play—and within a day the strings had been replaced and the instrument had been perfectly tuned. Daisy remembers the unsympathetic fluorescent lighting glinting off the guitar’s body while getting absorbed into the girl’s light curls as she bent over the strings, coaxing music out of the instrument like it was a conversation, the serenity when her eyes would close as though she was listening to a favorite story, the look in her eyes when she caught Skye watching her one time…

“You were in a group home?”

Daisy bites her lip, steering the van ever east on the highway, and starts to unspool the harder story.

“My dad murdered my mom when I was little, and I went into foster care at that time. I got bounced around in the northeast for a while, then ended up in a group home when I started to get a little too out of control in high school. I ran off the day I turned eighteen though and took the guitar with me.”

“Where did you go?” Melinda asks quietly, noticeably avoiding reacting to the first sentence in Daisy’s story.

“Down the east coast for a while. Hung a right in Florida, ended up in NOLA for a couple of years.”

She hesitates for a moment, then pulls out the small circle of silver that lives in the cup of her bra, always against her heart, reminding her how far she’s come. With her eyes on the road, she offers the token to Melinda, who takes it carefully from her.

“I got in a pretty bad place around then with booze and drugs, and I almost died after being stupid one night. Woke up in the hospital, had a moment of clarity, and decided I was done with that part of my life. I’m six years sober now.”

“That’s great,” Melinda says quietly, sounding like she means it, studying the sobriety chip in the swooping slants of street lights. “Is that what brought you to California?”

Daisy shakes her head. “No, I did rehab in Louisiana after I got out of the hospital. I made some friends there who wanted to try starting a band, and we went to California together after that. The band didn’t last, but it got me here, and I won our van in the last poker game we played before parting ways. I’ve kept playing for spare change, and I’ve tried to get on stage in bars and clubs as much as I can with my crazy schedule.”

“Is it not hard to stick to sobriety while always playing in bars?” Melinda asks, passing the chip back to her.

“It used to be,” Daisy admits as she returns the chip to its home in her bra. “I’ve slipped up twice, but I had a good support system by then, and that made all the difference. My friend Jemma’s been amazing—she doesn’t let me make excuses, but I know she’s always there for me. And Trip is a big help, too.”

“Were those the people who introduced me to you?”

Daisy nods as she takes the exit for the aforementioned overlook. “We don’t have a lot in common, but we all like the night-singer scene. And Maria’s has always felt like a really safe place for unknowns to try out an audience.”

The conversation pauses as the van begins the climb up the slope, and she needs all her attention on the manual gears as they make their way up towards the sky. Once the road levels out above the desert, Daisy finds her way to her preferred parking area. The lot is empty with no other cars are in sight, a stroke of luck that gives Daisy a spark of confidence.

Once she parks the car and kills the engine, Daisy opens the car door and stands up on the running board.

“Let’s eat up here,” she says, tossing a dirty towel from the backseat up on the roof of the car before boosting herself up. She spreads out the towel over the dirty surface, hoping she isn’t asking too much too much of a star who’s already been eating fries in her dirty van. Thankfully, Melinda’s door opens quickly and her head appears as she stands up on the passenger seat. The woman tosses the to-go bag up towards Daisy, then takes the hand she offers to pull her up on the roof.

~

Once they’re seated comfortably between the bars of the luggage rack, Daisy dives into the her dinner with a grin.

“Okay, I’m going to destroy these burgers now, so it’s your turn to talk. Tell me your life story.”

Amused, Melinda leans back on one hand.

“I have a Wikipedia page—what do you already know?”

“Um, I know your parents were in SHIELD and had more number ones than the Rolling Stones,” Daisy says around a mouthful of cheeseburger. “And I know you’ve been doing your solo thing at least since the nineties…but that’s about it.”

“Well, for starters, SHIELD’s drummer and lead guitarist weren’t my birth parents,” Melinda says, referring to the bandmates Daisy had mentioned. “In case you couldn’t tell from appearances alone. My biological mother was SHIELD’s manager, my father was their pilot. A plane crash took them both away when I was five, and that was when Vic and Nick adopted me.”

“Oh God, seriously? I had no idea,” Daisy says. “That’s awful. I’m so sorry.”

“It was a long a time ago,” Melinda says, shaking her head. “I don’t really remember any parents before Vic and Nick. They took a couple of years off touring after that, let me settle into their family for a while. They already had two other boys in their home—both of them were adopted too.”

She sees Daisy chewing slower and guesses that she does know a little more than she said before.

“And you know what happened to Nick and Vic, don’t you?”

Daisy nods, looking down, so Melinda skips that part.

“I was twenty-two when that happened—away with the Air Force. It may be a good thing I wasn’t around though, because I might have literally murdered John for doing that to them. At least he got a life sentence, so I mostly just try to forget he ever existed.”

“And your other brother?” Daisy prompts quietly.

Phil’s face materializes in her mind’s eye, and Melinda sighs.

“Well, he and I leaned on each other a lot in that time. It took a while to get all of Nick and Vic’s estate in order, to figure out all the things you have to do when someone famous dies. After things settled down though, we stuck with each other, moved into one of their old houses together.”

“But then you started singing yourself not too long after that…” Daisy says, still looking at her food instead of at Melinda.

“You can blame Phil for that. He caught me playing our mom’s old piano one night, heard me singing something I wrote while grieving, told me I should record it. Some old friends of my parents got ahold of the recording, and next thing I knew, that song was everywhere. I started getting offers left and right, and it was hard to say no to an open door like that. Phil hadn’t been in the music scene the way John had tried to be, but he’d seen enough of the business by then that when he offered to be my agent, I knew he would do a great job at it, knew I could trust him.”

“Looks like he came through for you,” Daisy says, smiling at Melinda as she wads up one of the burger wrappers.

Melinda smiles back, looking away. “Yeah. He was great. But then he died of cancer two years ago.”

Daisy goes quiet again, holding her second burger without unwrapping it.

“He’s who ‘I’ll Never Love Again’ is about, isn’t he?”

Melinda nods, the chords of the ballad playing themselves in her mind. “Yeah. I wrote it not long after he died.” She can still remember where she was sitting when the song came out of her, the exact angles of light across the piano as she hammered out the chords…

Daisy hesitates, and Melinda guesses what she’s wanting to ask.

“He and I were never involved romantically, if that’s what you’re wondering. But he _is_ probably the person I’ve loved the most in my life.”

Even in the dark, she can see Daisy blushing. “Sorry. I guess you know a lot of people have speculated over the years…”

Melinda huffs out a laugh, shaking her head up at the stars. “Twenty years, I’ve consistently denied it, and still people wonder…”

Daisy tries to hide behind a mouthful of burger.

“It’s a hella passionate song...”

“It was an emotional time,” Melinda cuts her off, thinking briefly of the spiral she’d fallen into for a few months after his death. “Writing and singing was the safest way I could let the pain out.”

_Not that that was the only way I let it all out…_

She lies back on the roof, propping her legs up and staring up at the stars while the girl finishes the rest of her meal.

“Do you ever write your own songs?” Melinda asks when she hears her balling up another burger paper. She looks over to see Daisy shrugging as she gathers the trash into the paper sack.

“I’ve written a few,” she says, leaning down to toss the trash through the open driver’s door into the car. “I don’t usually sing them—singing cover songs usually makes more people drop money in the guitar case. I’ve sung a few of yours before, actually…”

“Don’t think like that,” Melinda cuts her off. She’s heard this too many times, from too many talented people— _“There’s no guarantee anyone wants to hear what I think; optimism and hope don’t put dinner on the table…”_

Melinda swings her legs over the luggage rack and slides down the side of the van, landing nimbly on her feet. She slides open the van’s side door and grabs the guitar case that’s been waiting in the shadows, hefting it up onto the roof before climbing back up herself.

Daisy is trying to protest in some way as Melinda opens the case and sees _yeah, this guitar sure has seen better days_ , but she only pulls it out and onto her lap, checking its tuning.

_It sounds a lot better than it looks…_

“Here’s the thing about songwriting,” she eventually says, facing the girl again with the instrument still on her lap. Without watching her fingers, she plays a fast chromatic scale, E up to E.

“You, Daisy Johnson, have something no one else in the universe will ever have. You have your experiences, plus your perspective, plus your ear. All the music you’ve ever heard is just twelve notes between any octave.”

She plays the chromatic scale up from the bottom again. “Twelve notes, and the octave repeats.”

She plays the scale up another octave, then back down again to the first, lowest note. Her fingers fall into the motions familiar as riding a bicycle, and she keeps playing the first octave’s scale up and down again and again, climbing the stairs and tumbling perpetually down them.

“It's the same story, told over and over, forever. Twelve notes, a million different ways.”

She abruptly stops and holds out the guitar to Daisy, who takes it slowly, tucking it against her heart. She shifts her fingers, finding an E major chord easily, and strums it into the air, dispelling the dissonance hanging there after all the chromatics. Melinda puts her hand lightly on the guitar’s body, feeling the humming resonance inside, and Daisy meets her eyes.

“All any artist can offer the world is how they see those twelve notes,” Melinda says quietly. “How they set this world to music.”

Daisy doesn’t look away, but she thumbs another soft chord.

“I like how you see them,” she murmurs.

Melinda’s hand falls from the guitar to Daisy’s knee. “I want to know how _you_ see them.”

Daisy’s gaze lowers as her hands stroke the guitar strings thoughtfully, a musing series of soft chords, but after a brief pause, she begins a tune that sounds far more intentional, a song she knows by heart. Melinda watches Daisy’s eyes close, her expression turning focused, like she’s trying to translate a prophecy straight from God herself and wants every word to count.

“Tell me something girl…” Daisy begins, her voice barely louder than the guitar. “Aren’t you tired tryin’ to save the world… Or do you need more…Ain’t it hard keeping it so hardcore?”

Melinda closes her eyes, hanging on every note as the timbre of girl’s voice solidifies, growing more confident, and the strumming intensifies.

“I’m falling…In all the good times I find myself longing for change…And in the bad times I fear myself…”

Daisy’s voice changes.

Everything changes.

“I’m off the deep end, watch as I dive in, I’ll never meet the ground… Crash through the surface where they can’t hurt us—we’re far from the shallow now…In the shallow, shallow… In the sha-la-la-la shallow…”

Melinda opens her eyes as Daisy trails off, still strumming her guitar but staring intentionally downwards as the notes get quieter. Reaching out, Melinda brushes a hand over the girl’s cheek, drawing her gaze upward as her hands go still over the strings.

“I think you might be a songwriter,” Melinda whispers with a smile before leaning over the guitar and kissing her.

Daisy’s lips are soft against hers, but only for a single surprised second. Then Melinda feels one of the girl’s hands leave the guitar to thread into her hair, accepting, embracing. She waits a moment before moving, pressing in another kiss and then another…

She’s actually disoriented when Daisy abruptly pulls away a moment later, and Melinda opens her eyes to see the girl looking over her shoulder, lit up by a distant light growing brighter by the second…

“That’s a cruiser.”

Melinda turns around to see headlights approaching, blue and red lights flickering above them. Annoyed but also immediately on edge, she swings one leg over the luggage rack and squares up to the car.

“I don’t know what they want,” Daisy is muttering behind her, maneuvering the guitar back into its case. “We’re not doing anything wrong…”

The car stops about fifteen feet away, and the driver gets out, a flashlight held aloft.

“Good evening, ladies,” a male voice behind the light calls in their direction. “We’re looking for Melinda May.”

~

The cruiser is still following them back into town, and Melinda has turned her phone back on to have a conversation in forcefully measured tones with the person, apparently her assistant, who had tracked down the bar and subsequently Jemma in her search for the celebrity. Melinda had looked about ready to fight the cop at the overlook, so Daisy had stepped in and taken charge by turning the car back on.

“Just get in and I’ll take you back,” she’d said imploringly, standing in the driver’s side door. “I don’t need my name in the system around here.”

Melinda had given in fairly quickly after those words, though she continued to give daggers to the cop until Daisy drove past him on her way back down the mountain.

Now Melinda ends the call at her elbow, shoving her phone back in her pocket.

“Everything okay?” Daisy asks quietly, keeping her eyes on the road.

“Just my assistant being her usual overbearing self,” Melinda mutters. “Doesn’t trust me to get myself home before my flight tomorrow.”

“Okay. So where am I headed?” Daisy says as her van approaches the highway. “Back into town?”

“Yeah, the Crown Plaza on Fifth and Western.”

Daisy has never driven to that part of town—it’s way above her tax bracket—but she figures she can get them there without incident.

They drive in silence for a little while, and Daisy is mostly preoccupied with the cruiser in her review mirror until Melinda looks her direction.

“Thank you,” she says quietly. “For taking me up there, for telling me your story, for singing…”

Daisy looks over, meeting Melinda’s eyes briefly with a smile. “I don’t even know what to say—I can’t believe we just did that…”

Melinda smiles too, a smile that seems the tiniest bit lighter than each one that has preceded it.

“Would you fly out with me in the morning?”

The question is so shocking that Daisy can’t form an answer for an entire minute.

“Are you asking me to join your tour as a groupie?” she eventually asks carefully, hoping she’s misunderstood.

“No!” Melinda says immediately, seeming equally startled. “That’s not what I meant at all. I just…I don’t want this to be the last time I see you. I feel like…”

_Like we were just getting started?_

Daisy cautiously meets her eyes again. “Me too. But I’ve got a job, I’ve got commitments. I can’t just take off…”

“How can I stay in touch with you then?” Melinda asks, looking so hopeful that Daisy can only grin.

“Grab your phone—I’ll give you my number.”

They edge of the city is already creeping up on them again, as is the first hint of dawn. Daisy ends up needing to pull out her phone to search directions to the hotel, and by the time they are pulling in to the valet parking area, the sky has already faded from black to gray.

“You can come up, if you want to crash here tonight,” Melinda offers as Daisy puts the car in park. “You could use the shower, we could get some room service…”

Though the offer is tempting on multiple levels, Daisy forces herself to shake her head. “Not today. Let’s save it for next time.”

She wants to believe there will be a next time, but she needs Melinda to prove it first. This is her first brush with celebrity, after all.

And the singer seems to understand, because she doesn’t argue, just nods once before leaning forward to pull Daisy into a deep kiss.

“I’m so glad I met you,” Melinda whispers against her lips when she pulls away, and Daisy feels herself smiling dreamily at her.

“Me too,” she says, stroking her thumb over the woman’s cheek. “This feels like a dream.”

A valet attendant appearing at her window makes Daisy finally turn away to wave him off as Melinda opens her door and climbs out.

“I have your number,” she calls through the open window as she steps away in the direction of the lobby, and something about that sounds like a promise.

“Looking forward to hearing from you,” Daisy calls back, smiling wider.

Melinda smiles one last time and waves, then turns and moves through the revolving doors into a lobby that is bigger than the entirety of Maria’s bar and Rosie’s diner combined. Daisy waits until the woman is almost out of sight before putting the van in gear and pulling out of the circle, ready to get her car back into the part of town it belongs in. She has a shift in four hours, so she drives straight to the diner, finding a space in the back of the parking lot and climbing into the back of her car for some much-needed shut-eye. Before she lies down, Daisy finds the spare charger in her bag and plugs in her dying phone, surprised to see a text message from a new number waiting on the screen.

**I can’t wait to hear your twelve notes again. <3**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you haven't heard "Shallow" yet (have you been living under a rock?) do yourself a favor and give it a listen.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Building something long-distance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Took a break for the July drabble challenge but I'm back! I have a few (new) little things I'm trying to get ready for the August challenge that starts next week, so stay tuned!

Jemma wants to hear everything. Multiple times, over multiple cups of coffee. She camps out at the dinner for the entire afternoon, roping Daisy into further conversation every time the restaurant slows down enough to allow it.

“So were you not at all flustered?” Jemma says disbelievingly after Daisy tells her “all the details” a third time. “I mean—you had _Melinda May_ in your home, you sang an original song for her and she _liked_ it…”

“Honestly I might still be in shock,” Daisy admits. “I kind of still can’t believe it happened.”

“And you _kissed_ her,” Jemma repeats, looking as amazed as she was the first time she said it.

“Don’t go telling everyone that part,” Daisy warns. “I don’t know yet if this was a one-time thing, but I don’t want everyone at Maria’s calling me a video girl.”

“Has she texted you again yet?” her friend asks eagerly, looking pointedly at Daisy’s apron pocket where she keeps her phone during shifts.

Daisy glances around and sees Rosalind not far away.

“I don’t know—I’ll check the next time I go to the walk-in.”

“But you can’t respond from the freezer—you know you have no signal in there.” Jemma leans forward with a grin. “I think you should let me hold onto your phone until your shift is over and let me give you a running commentary on the state of your message box.”

“Jemma, I love you, but not a chance in hell,” Daisy says, patting her cheek before moving to refill another diner’s fountain drink.

Jemma has to leave before Daisy’s shift is over that evening, and Daisy does indeed check her messages in the freezer before the dinner rush hits. There’s one text waiting—a picture from the window of a tall building overlooking the golden city of Phoenix.

 **Wish you were here,** the caption reads.

Daisy smiles to herself and tucks her phone back in her pocket until she can respond. When she does that evening, it’s with a picture of her bare feet stretched out towards the steering wheel, the chaos of her van’s contents clearly visible.

**Kind of wish you were here, too.**

Melinda’s reply comes immediately.

**Only kind of? ;)**

Daisy isn’t quite sure how to respond and lets it lie, but a few minutes later, another message appears.

**Do you have a web page, twitter, insta, anything that you promote your music with? I want to link my fans to you on twitter.** **J**

Stunned, Daisy fumbles a response.

**I don’t have anything actually. I just sing locally and rely on word of mouth for gigs.**

**You can reach a lot more people with a website,** Melinda’s next response reads. **Even an Instagram with short clips of your stuff would be something.**

 **You’d think a programmer would have thought of that,** Daisy types back, followed by the facepalm emoji.

**Does your van have wifi? Make something now. And let me know if you do.**

Slightly annoyed but mostly at herself, Daisy sets her phone aside and considers it. Despite being in the music scene for going on three years, she’s never really advertised herself before. Her friend Trip has a webpage—she helped him set it up, in fact—but she had always balked at the thought of making anything for herself. When the bulk of her experiences had taught that covers caught attention and her original music was unremarkable, it was hard to feel like a website just for herself was worth the effort.

Now, Daisy pulls over her laptop and opens the folder filled with clips of her performances that Jemma has filmed for her in the past couple of years. Mostly at Maria’s, but a couple are from the boardwalk, too. She tallies them up and is surprised to discover that there is an even split of videos of her singing covers and her own songs.

Conveniently, her van _does_ have wifi…

~

There are only five concerts left on the tour now, and Melinda is enjoying a day off in the hotel’s spa with Elena, her guitarist, and Piper, her bassist. The three of them have only known each other a couple of years, since Melinda hired them out of ordinary playing gigs she’d wandered into between tours. Conveniently, Elena had been a packaged set with her partner, who was an incredible drummer. He, most likely, is off on his own in some quiet corner of Vancouver, their current city, recharging his introvert batteries before the concert tomorrow.

Melinda, facedown in a massage table, still has her phone in sight on the shelf beneath her, watching for any incoming messages. The device is on silent, but the vibrations echo through the wood of the shelf with each notification, and Elena eventually chuckles.

“You know, I think the point of a massage is to check out for an hour,” the woman murmurs next to her, face down in her own table. “I thought Jeff knew it was your day off.”

“It’s not Jeff she’s waiting to hear from,” Piper teases from Elena’s other side, too far away for Melinda to elbow.

“Oh, what have I missed?” Elena says eagerly, turning towards the other woman.

Melinda leaves it to Piper to tell the minimal story she knows, feeling slightly smug but also very protective of the details. When Elena prods for more information, she doesn’t add much.

“Should I be worried about getting replaced?” Elena teases when Piper mentions Daisy playing guitar. “I seem to remember you hiring me in a similar situation.”

“I don’t remember kissing you before inviting you to join my band,” Melinda mutters, gritting her teeth as the masseuse works on a stubborn knot in her neck.

“You would have lost me and Mack in one fell swoop if you’d tried,” Elena teases. “So are you going to see this girl again?”

Melinda stares at her phone, void of the messages she’s been hoping for. “I hope so.”

Later that night, she’s got her headphones plugged into her keyboard and is going back and forth between rehearsing her own songs and trying to work out the chords from Daisy’s song when the faint tremor of footsteps makes her look over her shoulder.

She jumps slightly at the sight of Bobbi and narrows her eyes as she pushes the headphones down to her neck. Just because her assistant always has a spare key to her room doesn’t mean she’s supposed to use it whenever she wants…

“What’s up?”

Her assistant raises a folder. “I texted you. Got some general housekeeping, stuff for you to sign, the usual.”

Melinda glances at her phone, which she’d tossed out of sight on the sofa. “Can we do it later?”

“You have a concert tomorrow night, so my day off ended an hour ago,” Bobbi reminds her, pulling out another chair at the table where Melinda has set her keyboard up. “And some of this is time-sensitive.”

Melinda sighs as she moves the keyboard back on the table and then pulls the folder in front of her. Bobbi patiently goes through the paperwork with her—checklists for the concert, the next day’s itinerary, payroll checks for her band and crew, and some memos from her label.

“Did you and Lance go out today?” Melinda asks, making an effort to be pleasant as Bobbi gathers all the papers back into her folder.

“We did walk around this morning,” the woman answers as she taps the pile into neat stacks before filing them all away. “Nice to be out and unscheduled for a bit.”

“Want to go out together tonight?” Melinda offers, knowing Bobbi will say no.

“Nah, I’ve got a date with my husband and a pillow-topped mattress,” Bobbi says with a shake of her head. “But you’re welcome to hang with us for dinner if you're interested in some food with your wine.”

It's her own fault, but Melinda supposes it was too optimistic to hope Bobbi wouldn't notice the bottle on the nightstand...or the one on the coffee table...

“You never told me it was an open relationship,” Melinda says instead of turning it into an argument, and Bobbi swats her good-naturedly with the folder as she gets to her feet.

“Working on anything new?” she says with a nod at the keyboard as Melinda pulls it back in front of herself.

Melinda hesitates, then decides to take a risk.

“That girl back in LA? She’s a singer/songwriter, and she’s got this _amazing_ song…”

~

Fresh off a mid-week evening singing at Maria’s, Daisy has her van parked up on her favorite overlook again. Lying up on the roof, she scrolls on her phone through the stats of her brand-new YouTube channel. Most of her videos have garnered only a single digit number of views, and Daisy guesses that they’re all from people she knows personally (Jemma’s as good of a hype man as she can be, but they’re all friends with the same people). Wondering passively if there is anything like this of Melinda May out there on the internet, she types ‘Melinda May singing early career’ into the website’s search bar, and a four-digit number of results appears.

There are only a few grainy clips—the beginning of this woman’s career was before the days of smart phones, so all the footage is from large-enough gigs to have real media cameras present. Considering her lineage and the network of publicity already available to her when she started, even Melinda’s early concerts were to packed houses.

Daisy watches a couple of clips, noticing how Melinda’s voice sounds almost the same even thirty years later, just slightly huskier. It’s stranger to see the softness in her features, her face not yet thinned out by years and experience.

Daisy’s phone screen suddenly goes black with an incoming call, and she answers at the sight of her friend’s name.

“Hey Jem, what’s up?”

“Daisy! I thought you were going to stay over tonight—where have you disappeared to?”

“Hey, Jem, don’t worry—I saw you and Fitz were getting a little cozy at the bar, and I didn’t want to make it a crowd at your place. I also didn’t want to be on the sofa knowing what was going on in the bedroom.”

“Oh grow up, Daisy, we would have been quiet!” Jemma grumbles, though there’s no real spite behind it. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather come over?”

“Not tonight, Jem. I’m already up on the mountain and I’m fine here. Promise.”

“All right,” her friend sighs, and Daisy hears Fitz’s voice in the background. “Fitz wants to make sure you’re still coming for brunch in the morning though.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Daisy says, smiling to herself. “You two have fun tonight.”

“Ugh, never say that again,” Jemma groans, but Daisy can hear the smile in her voice. “See you tomorrow, Daisy. Love you.”

“Love you too. Night.”

Daisy hangs up and drops her phone to her chest, closing her eyes as she breathes the rare quiet the distance from the city offers. Her phone suddenly starts ringing again, and Daisy brings it back to her ear without looking at the screen.

“Jemma, I told you, I’m good. Go bang your husband and leave me out of it.”

There’s a beat of silence before a voice that is definitely _not_ Jemma’s chuckles.

“I take it you’re not into threesomes, then.”

Daisy’s heart stutters in her chest, and she pulls the phone from her ear, staring at the name on the screen in horror.

“Melinda, oh my god…” she stammers as she brings the device back to her ear. “I’m so sorry, I thought…”

“It’s all good,” Melinda says, not sounding bothered. “My assistant’s probably doing the same thing next door as we speak. So what are you up to, besides staying out of a married couple’s bedroom?”

“Oh my god, it’s not like that—I mean—my married friends and I have a standing arrangement that I can crash at their place once a week, and it’s usually Wednesday after Jemma and I sing at Maria’s, but I knew they probably wanted the house to themselves tonight...”

“I get it, I get it,” Melinda cuts her off. “Sorry, didn’t mean to embarrass you. So what are you doing?”

Daisy glances around at the deserted overlook. “Staying out of the way. I’m up at the place on the mountain that I took you, actually.”

 “So it really is a favorite place of yours.”

Daisy shrugs. “It’s a reliable quiet spot, anyway. What are you doing? I assumed you had a concert every night—aren’t you still on tour?”

“Tonight’s a free night. Can’t run everyone ragged and expect a good performance every night.”

“Makes sense. So how are you spending it?”

In the background, Daisy hears a piano chord. “Messing around on the keyboard. I was actually trying to remember how your song went.”

Daisy’s heartbeat picks up. “Oh my god, really?”

She thinks she can hear Melinda smiling again. “I’m trying—didn’t say I got it. You played it in G major, right?”

Daisy sits up excitedly. “Yeah! That’s right.”

“Can I play it for you and you tell me if I remembered it right?”

“Oh my god, I might _die_ , but of course you can!”

“Let me call you back on a video call—that would be easier.”

When Melinda’s face appears on her phone screen a moment later, the phone appears propped up on the table where a portable keyboard is set up. The woman is dressed down in what looks like a workout top, her hair messy, makeup absent. This alone makes Daisy grin—it’s a far cry from the public face she’s seen on album covers or the Internet. Behind her is what looks like the living room of a hotel suite larger than any place Daisy’s lived in the past decade.

“Bear with me,” Melinda warns as she puts her hands on the keyboard. “Like I said—I’m trying.”

She plays a few chords, too fast but in the right progression.

“Goes like that underneath, right?”

“Sounds right,” Daisy responds, somewhat breathlessly.

“Awesome. And the first verse…”

Melinda plays it with one hand, still a little fast, and Daisy can hear her singing softly over it, though it’s just syllables. She’s never heard any other person sing anything she’s written before, and this alone makes her grin widely. The fact that it’s _Melinda May_ doing the singing threatens to make her pass out.

“Yep, that’s how it goes,” she says when Melinda pauses. “I can’t believe you memorized it in one listen.”

“It’s a hell of a song,” Melinda says with a flash of a smile before putting both hands on the keys.

“So, all together…”

She plays it through at the right tempo this time, not singing over it but playing the melody with her right hand. Daisy listens with a dreamy smile on her face, loving every second.

“This is insane,” she murmurs when Melinda pauses again, and the woman glances up with a knowing smile.

“Does it have a second verse?”

“Sort of,” Daisy says. “I kind of wanted it to be a duet, but I didn’t want to count on having another singer with me…”

“I was thinking that it would make such a great duet!” Melinda exclaims, eyes lighting up. “How does the second verse go?”

Daisy hesitates. She doesn’t normally sing _acapella_ —she’s never had much confidence in her voice without backing—but she doesn’t want to bother climbing down and getting her guitar. Melinda doesn’t say anything, but she does play the root cord expectantly. Suddenly too shy to look at her, Daisy looks up from her phone screen and out over the city.

“Tell me something girl…” she sings, “Are you happy in this modern world? Or do you need more? Is there something else you’re searching for…I’m falling…”

She cuts herself off, glancing back down at her phone and shrugging self-consciously. “Then the pre-chorus would be the same. I saw this verse coming before the other verse actually. Verse, pre-chorus, verse, pre-chorus, chorus…”

“Someone needs to get you a record deal already,” Melinda says, grinning at her through the phone. “You’re a natural.”

“Hey I did get a YouTube channel set up by the way,” Daisy takes the opportunity to add.

“Really? Awesome! Send me a link.” Melinda puts her hands on the keys again. “How do you hear the chorus going?”

For the next few minutes, they work the song out together, Daisy singing it out and Melinda playing it back. Having never heard it on a piano, Daisy closes her eyes and lets herself float on the sound, enjoying the song for itself rather than overanalyzing it the way she does when she’s the one playing or singing it.

“I wish we could try singing it together,” Melinda says as the chorus tapers off, “but with even this small delay over the phone, you’d be missing the beat with the piano.”

“Well, guess you’ll just have to come back to LA, then,” Daisy teases. “I’m singing at Maria’s Friday—you’ll know where to find me.”

Nothing shocks her more than when that’s almost exactly what happens.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bringing the duet together on the big stage

The next morning, Daisy wakes up to a phone screen full of notifications, a eight new ones popping up even as she stares dumbly at the screen. Rubbing her eyes and pulling the device closer, Daisy unlocks her phone and sees the red dots in several app corners with numbers she’s never ever accumulated, and she hurriedly opens Youtube first. She’s got hundreds of new followers to both pages, each video has _thousands_ of new views and at least a hundred comments each. Plenty are critical, but there are tons more that are positive, praising her singing ability and original songs. Her user page there doesn’t list her phone number, but it _does_ list her email and insta handle, which is probably why her gmail inbox has a little red number in the corner of the icon that scares her away from opening it, and on Instagram she has tons of new followers with unprecedented traffic on every post. From the comments across her videos, she’s already gleaned that Melinda is to thank (blame?) for all this, but it’s not until she searches the star’s Twitter (Daisy doesn’t have an account herself) that she finds the proof.

 **Melinda May** @RealMelinda – June 7 11:38pm

Everyone stop what you’re doing and go check out this girl! She has an incredible voice and big things ahead of her, I’m sure! #risingstar #getthisgirlarecorddealalready <link:youtube.com/daisyjohnsonsingsincali> 

Daisy doesn’t know what to say, but she leads with the obvious as she fires off a text message before squirming out of bed and up into the driver’s seat.

**So I just woke up to a billion notifications…thanks for tweeting my page!**

Melinda doesn’t respond until Daisy is already at work and on the clock, and it’s after the lunch rush before she has a chance to read it and respond herself.

**_\--You’re welcome! You deserve it! Hope everyone’s being kind. If not, let me at em._ **

Daisy smiles and fires off a quick response as she swings a bag of garbage into the dumpster behind the alley.

**I haven’t had the courage to open my email yet…but overall the comments on youtube and insta are mostly positive!**

**_\--Good! They’d better be. You deserve way more cheerleaders than just me._ **

**“Just” you. Ha.**

**_\--Hey what are your plans for tonight?_ **

**Singing at Maria’s after work. Why?**

**_\--I have a different plan._ **

That’s the last Daisy hears from her before she clocks out around 5 and heads into town to Maria’s. It’s not dark yet, way earlier than she usually gets to the bar, and she’s met in the dressing room by squeals and cheers. Girls she’s barely talked to in the past year are now tripping over each other to congratulate her, asking to snap selfies of her, @-ing her on insta about her performance tonight…

Maria is suddenly there, though, dispelling the chaos with those superpowers she seems to have, and Daisy hasn’t even taken off her work shirt before the woman is leading her out into the bar without an explanation.

“Maria, I’m sorry, I can sit tonight out if you'd rather I wasn’t here…”

But Maria only waves her words away as she leads Daisy up to a wiry man in a suit jacket over a t-shirt standing near the front door.

“You’re Daisy?” he says, glancing at Maria for confirmation, and the woman nods. “Right,” he continues. “Well, I need you to gather your best friends and come get in my car, quickly please.”

“Are we in trouble?” Daisy asks, not moving from where she stands.

“No, you’re VIPs at Melinda’s show in Seattle tonight,” he says, holding up three lanyards with the letters prominently displayed. “And the concert’s beginning at seven, so we need to hurry—it’s nearly a three hour flight.”

Heart pounding at what this could mean, Daisy chooses not to think too much and just hurry back for her back, then plow through the bar in search of Jemma and Trip. She hardly needs to drag them to the car when she tells them what is happening, and the three of them rush out to the road to find a large black SUV waiting. The driver makes a call once they’ve hit the road, telling someone that they’re on their way to the airstrip and could arrive at the concert not long after intermission. Before he hangs up though, he holds the phone out to Daisy, who is riding directly behind his driver’s seat.

“She wants to talk to you,” he says, and Daisy glimpses that the screen says only M as she brings the phone to her ear.

“Hello?”

“You’re coming!” Melinda exclaims on the other side, a sound that makes Daisy’s heart pick up automatically. There is a thudding base in the background, and Melinda’s practically shouting into the phone, but Daisy thinks she can hear her grinning. “I’m so glad. I can’t wait to see you”

“To Seattle? And you’re flying us up? How did you even get tickets this last minute? You don’t even know my friends’ full names!”

“Do you really think I’m the kind of person who sends my friends flying commercial? You’re heading for my private plane now!”

“You’re flying us up on your plane?” Daisy repeats for Jemma and Trip’s benefit, and their faces light up. “Oh my god, are you serious?”

The music fades slightly in the background—it sounds like Melinda has stepped further away from the stage.

“Sorry, final sound check before we start letting people in. Hey, listen, that song you wrote…do you think we could sing it tonight?”

“Sing it…at your concert?” Daisy says slowly. “Are you out of your mind?”

“I told you—I want to sing it with you.” Melinda sounds genuinely hopeful.

“It’s…it’s not done…” Daisy stammers.

“I think I have an ending for it,” Melinda says. “All you’ve gotta do is trust me.”

“Melinda, I’m literally wearing my work uniform right now…”

“You got that black dress in your bag?”

Daisy attempts to protest again, but Melinda seems to be caught up in something on the other side of the call, as several voices join hers suddenly.

“Daisy, I’ve got to go,” Melinda says when the call clears up. “Just make sure you warm your voice up before you get here. You’ll be amazing, don’t worry.”

She hangs up without waiting to hear Daisy’s reply, and Daisy lowers the phone as she turns towards her friends’ expectant gazes.

“I think…she wants me to sing with her.”

The car takes them not to LAX, but to a private airstrip that Daisy has never seen before where a small, gleaming white-and-gold plane is waiting. The driver, Hunter, hustles them out of the car and up the ramp, pausing only to hand off the keys and sign a clipboard before running up after them.

“All right, let’s go!” he calls towards the cockpit, and stairway immediately folds up into the aircraft. The plane starts taxiing, and while Jemma and Trip are already hurrying through the small space exclaiming over everything, Hunter shoos them into seats.

“Still have to buckle in for takeoff and landing,” he says, and the three of them concede, folding into the soft armchairs of seats.

“I could get used to this,” Trip says with a grin, leaning back in his seat. “I already saw a bar—think there’s a kitchen too?”

“In the back!” Hunters voice carries down the cabin. “But don’t go hitting buttons without asking me for help!”

Daisy pulls over her bag as the plane turns onto a runway.

“Jemma, I only have my usual outfit—dress, shoes, fishnets. This is the kind of place with like 10,000 people…”

“Twenty thousand,” Hunter calls again, opening a magazine, and Jemma shoots him a withering look that he doesn’t see.

“Don’t worry Daisy, we’ll figure it all out—I’ve got my bag too.”

She reaches over and squeezes Daisy’s hand as the plane races down the runway and then ulifts into the air.

The sun has set and Daisy has donned her dress and heels (leaving the fishnets in her bag after using the provided shower kits to shave her legs in the shower— _a shower! On a plane!_ ) when they disembark at a different airport. Jemma has done her makeup and fixed her hair into curls she calls “edgy”, but Daisy has nothing except her white short-sleeved work button-down to put over the dress to make herself look less like a misplaced clubber as they descend the stairs to the tarmac. A tall, blonde woman with a Bluetooth headset over one ear meets them with a different, bigger car at bottom, hustling them all in and ordering Hunter to floor it all the way to the venue.

“I’m Bobbi, Melinda’s assistant,” she says, turning to face them from the shotgun seat. “Her concert should be closing out within the hour, but she told me she’ll drag it out until you all get there. God knows her audience won’t mind. Go ahead and get those VIP badges on.”

It’s a miracle they aren’t pulled over at least once on the fifteen-minute, white-knuckle drive to the event center, but instead of parking on the street level, Hunter steers the car down a ramp into the underbelly of the building.

“Just leave your stuff in the car,” Bobbi orders as they cruise to a stop, opening her door before the driver has even put the vehicle in park.

The three of them obey (Daisy doffs her work shirt and leaves it too) and clamber out of the car. They follow her at a trot through the darkened labyrinth of the event center’s sublevels between the garage and the backstage area, dodging equipment on wheels and security guards as they go. A thumping bass is audible even from the garage, but as they come up a few levels, music begins to bleed through the halls at an increasingly loud volume. Guards wave Bobbi and the three of them through a few more elevators and sets of doors, and then suddenly the lights change from fluorescent to a rainbow of colors as the music hits them full blast.

It takes a minute for Daisy’s eyes to adjust, and by then, they’ve been ushered into the wings just outside of the action. Melinda is front and center on the stage before them with an electric guitar over shoulder, jamming with her band so hard that Daisy can see sweat drops flinging in the light every time she swings her hair. It’s the closest she’s ever been to a rock concert, and this alone makes Daisy feel absolutely ecstatic. But it’s _Melinda_ , it’s a sold-out audience, and she’s supposed to be right out there with her at any moment…

The song soars to a conclusion that leaves the audience roaring, and Melinda gestures proudly to her band before making her way to the mic again. She looks their direction, and Bobbi waves and gestures dramatically to Daisy, causing Melinda to break into a grin.

“Thank you, Seattle!” Melinda says as she turns back towards the audience, and the crowd roars again at being acknowledged. “We’re gonna do something different for this next song, how does that sound?” When they again cheer in response, Melinda grins. “There’s a friend of mine who came a long way to be here tonight, and she wrote a song I think you all are going to love. Can you give her a Seattle-worthy welcome?”

Daisy’s heart races impossibly faster as the crowd’s volume manages to climb higher while Melinda hands off her guitar to a stagehand and strides towards their side of the stage. She’s grinning widely as she steps into the shadows and meets Daisy with a sweaty hug.

“Hey! I’m so glad you made it. How are you feeling?” she asks as she pulls away. Her makeup is far more dramatic than Daisy has ever seen it, but she’s sure that’s for stage effect. Melinda is wearing a loose, cut-up band tank over a visible black bra, a studded black belt over black leggings, and chunky, don’t-fuck-with-me-cuz-these-can-kill-you boots.

“I’m freaking out so bad right now, Melinda,” Daisy says, sure the woman could feel her trembling when she hugged her. “I’ve never sung for an audience like this, and I look like the Rocky Horror Picture Show compared to you!”

“Here,” Melinda says, gesturing for a stagehand, who hurries up with a dark garment held out like an offering. Melinda shakes out the black leather jacket and swings it around Daisy’s shoulders, and she moves her arms into the sleeves. It fits her perfectly, and Daisy distantly wonders where it’s come from.

“There,” Melinda says, adjusting the collar. “Instant rocker glam. Now, ready to show the world what you can do?”

She’s grinning eagerly, but Daisy still hesitates.

“There’s _so many people_ —" she repeats, looking past her towards the four levels of fans.

Melinda waves a hand dismissively. “Forget them. I’ll be right there with you. If it helps, don’t even look at them. Just look at me.”

Daisy turns instinctively towards Jemma, who immediately steps closer and takes her hand.

“You can say no,” she whispers, her mantra to Daisy when she’s feeling tempted towards anything they knows is bad for her.

But this isn’t bad, just scary.

And Daisy wants to say yes.

She looks back at Melinda, who is ignoring the impatient clapping of the crowd behind her, eyes fixed on Daisy.

“You can do this, Daisy,” she says, squeezing her elbow gently. “I believe in you.”

Daisy takes a deep breath and, for the first time in a long time, wishes she had a drink in her head. Instead, Melinda slips her own hand into it.

“I’ll lead us. Can you trust me?”

Jemma releases her and pats her back encouragingly, and Daisy finally nods. Melinda grins in response, tugging her towards the stage.

“I’ll be on the piano and you can play one of my guitars. You’re going to be great.”

Daisy barely feels her own feet moving as she steps out into a sensory overload of light and noise, following Melinda out into the audience’s view. The sound is deafening, and Daisy keeps her eyes fixed on Melinda as the woman gestures for one of the stagehands to bring over an acoustic guitar, already plugged in. Melinda makes sure she gets it over her shoulder all right before moving towards the center mic, and Daisy can tell as soon as she touches the instrument that this thing is worth more than her life.

“All right, this is my friend, Daisy Johnson,” Melinda says, causing the crowd to cheer louder, and Daisy deliberately keeps her eyes down on the guitar, “and if you haven’t heard of her before…I’m sure this won’t be the last time you do. We’re gonna play a song she wrote, and hopefully y’all think it’s as amazing as I do.”

Melinda leaves the mic and hurries past Daisy towards her piano, which has been wheeled out to the center of the stage. “G major still good?” she calls, and Daisy nods mechanically. Melinda takes her seat at the piano and adjusts the microphone in front of herself, nodding towards the center mic, encouraging Daisy to take it. She does move though, just keeps her eyes on the star as Melinda plays the opening chords, a soothing progression that somehow works to put her a little more at ease.

“Tell me something girl,” Melinda leads, the first verse she’d written herself the other night. “Are you happy in this modern world? Or do you need more? Is there something else you’re searching for…”

And then the pre-chorus, just like how Daisy had played it…

“I’m falling…In all the good times I feel myself longing for change…And in the bad times I fear myself…”

Daisy’s fingertips find the first chord automatically, and she carefully begins plucking into the spaces between the piano sounds, trying to fit herself further towards the song. She keeps her eyes down as she turns towards the mic stand, takes a few cautious steps forward, then takes a deep breath.

“Tell me something girl,” she begins with her eyes closed, “aren’t you tired tryin to save the world? Or do you need more? Ain’t it hard keeping it so hardcore?”

She thinks she can hear cheering over the music, but she can’t make herself open her eyes as she strums segue into the pre-chorus.

“I’m falling…In all the good times I find myself longing for change…And in the bad times I fear myself…”

_Here come the big notes._

_Oh my god…_

_Don’t think about them. Just sing it to her._

“I’m off the deep end, watch as I dive in, I’ll never meet the ground! Crash through the surface where they can’t hurt us…We’re far from the shallow now…”

Melinda’s voice suddenly joins her again, and Daisy finally dares open her eyes to look back at the woman on her piano, their eyes meeting as their voices and instruments land on the beat together.

“In the shallow, sha-ha-ha-low—” they find harmonies instinctively, Melinda singing beneath Daisy—“in the shallow shalalalow, in the shallow, sha-ha-halow, we’re far from the shallow now!”

Melinda grins at her, nodding eagerly for Daisy to continue as she hammers out the chords. Daisy isn't quite sure of the chord progressions on this part, so she lets her hands fall from the strings, facing the mic daring to riff over the chords until the next chorus hits.

“I’m off the deep end, watch as I dive in, I’ll never meet the ground! Crash through the surface where they can’t hurt us…We’re far from the shallow now…”

This one she sings alone again, but as the backing of the band fades out behind her, she feels a light touch on the back of her shoulder before, in her periphery sees Melinda leaning into the same mic.

“In the shallow, sha-hahalow…”

Daisy pivots until they’re facing each other, the guitar, the mic, and the song between them.

“In the sha-la-sha-la-shahallow…”

Melinda’s eyes never leave hers.

“In the shallow, shalalalow…We’re far from the shallow now…”

The song ends so suddenly that it is disorienting, especially when the roar of the crowd crashes over them, compensating immediately for the drop in volume. For the briefest moment, though, Daisy doesn’t hear them. Her eyes are locked on Melinda’s, the song still holding them together in the moment, and had Melinda not after a second turned away to acknowledge the audience, gesturing proudly to Daisy, she thinks she might have kissed her. But then she looks towards the noise, realizing all over again just how many people are watching them, and she’s glad she didn’t actually go for it. Melinda is grinning and clapping herself as she turns back towards Daisy, and all she can do is raise an embarrassed had in thanks towards the crowd before hurriedly pulling the guitar off her shoulder and offering it back to the singer.

“Let’s hear it one more time for Daisy Johnson,” Melinda says, catching Daisy’s arm before she can run away. The crowd roars, and Melinda turns away from the mic, saying words only for her.

“You were amazing.”

Daisy smiles back and exhales.

“Thank you for letting me do that with you.”

She leans back just a little, trying to communicate her desire to get off the stage, out of the spotlight, and Melinda thankfully lets go of her.

“Wait for me to finish the show,” she calls as Daisy backs away, waving to the audience one more time.

Daisy nods, smiles again, then turns and hurries out of the lights and into Jemma and Trip’s waiting arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GaGa and Cooper's Oscars performance of this absolutely slays, but if there's one scene from the actual film you should all watch, I'd say it's this one.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter when the tags/warnings are extra relevant--maybe take a gander at them if you haven't read them in awhile.

Melinda bends to a single encore, might have made it a double if it weren’t for the people waiting for her off stage. She tries to wave Daisy out for a curtain call too, but when the young woman shakes her head furiously, Melinda only invites another round of applause for her from the audience before leaving the stage and telling the stage manager to bring up the house lights—she’s done for tonight.

In the wings, she hugs Daisy again before being properly introduced to her friends, Jemma and Trip, the two who she had first seen in the bar the night she met Daisy. They’re both dressed in plainclothes this time but still seem just as star-struck as before, and Melinda quickly passes around introductions to her bandmates, main crew, and backup singers. The crowd slowly moves away from the stage and makes its way down towards the dressing rooms, and Bobbi takes charge of the guests while Melinda goes to change clothes and clean off the bulk of her stage makeup. She tries to wave Daisy in with her, but the girl defers, sticking close to her friends, and Melinda doesn’t push it.

She does take a quick drink from the bottle in her dressing table before diving back out into the party, though.

The big room designated for tonight’s afterparty is already rowdy as Melinda leads her guests in with her arm around Daisy’s waist. The three visitors continue to look a little starry-eyed as they join the party—the tour’s not over, but they’re almost done, and the parties have been increasing in caliber for the past week or two. With another concert tomorrow, Melinda guesses this one won’t be too intense, but she has every intention of enjoying it.

Daisy hesitates as someone passes her a glass of something, and Melinda is a little ashamed that this is what makes her remember the girl’s sobriety commitment. She quickly takes the glass herself, knocking it back quickly, before getting Daisy a glass filled with bottled water.

“You can just hang onto this and people will quit offering you stuff,” she mutters, and Daisy nods slightly.

“Yep. I know the drill.”

“Is being here bothering you?” Melinda asks, bowing her head close to Daisy’s. “We can leave if you want.”

“I’m all right for now,” Daisy says, looking around with her same awed expression from before. “I don’t want this night to be over just yet.”

Melinda smiles slyly. “Well, we can keep the party going back at the hotel, whenever you’re ready to leave.”

Though she tries to stay close and play hostess, Jemma eventually hauls Daisy away into an excited conversation with Elena. Melinda has busied herself with scarfing down a cookie to pad her empty stomach all while mixing another drink when Piper suddenly appears at her elbow.

“So that’s her, huh?”

Melinda catches the woman’s eye, and she can’t tell if her bassist is jealous or curious.

“That’s the one.”

“She’s got a hell of a voice,” Piper acknowledges as she refills her own drink. “Is this a one-night thing, or are you wanting her to join the tour?”

Melinda glances over at Daisy, still chatting easily with Elena and now Mack too. “I was planning to offer, but it’s not a for-sure thing. She’s got a life in LA that I don’t know if she’d be willing to leave for long.”

“In exchange for the chance to join the tour?” Piper scoffs. “What else does she need to convince her?”

“Stability,” Melinda answers. “Or at least her version of it.” She takes a long pull from her glass, trying to hurry her buzz along.

“Some people are into your version of stability.”

Melinda smirks over at Piper over the rim of her glass. “So I recall.”

Piper glares playfully at her before swatting Melinda’s ass playfully. “Want me to turn on the charm and try to convince her to come with us?”

“Don’t you dare,” Melinda responds humorlessly, downing the rest of her drink before pouring another.

~

Daisy continues through the afterparty in a half-daze, which she slowly starts to wonder might be due to the scented smoke gradually filling the room. She ignores it for a little while, but when her conversation partner (one of the dancers) shamelessly offers her a pair of unidentified pills, Daisy pulls her internal fire alarm, backing away and looking frantically around for Melinda or Jemma. Thankfully, her friend isn’t far, and Jemma immediately leaves her conversation partner to crowd close to Daisy to be heard through the noise.

“Are you all right?” she asks, and Daisy nods against her temple.

“This is really stressing me out, though,” she says.

“We could ask to leave…” Jemma says, looking around for Trip.

“And go where?” Daisy shrugs. “We’re in _Seattle_ …”

Melinda is suddenly nearby though, close enough that Daisy can smell the last drink she’s had on her breath, though the glass in her hand is still full.

“You all are staying with us tonight,” she announces, gesturing to the crowd filling the room. “We’ve got a whole floor at the Hilton. Plenty of space for you all, too.”

“Thank you—that sounds great,” Jemma says, taking over the role of professional courtesy flawlessly. “Any chance Daisy and I could head there now? We’re both exhausted and not really feeling the party scene anymore.”

Melinda’s eyes shift to Daisy’s for confirmation, and Daisy nods. Melinda knocks back the drink in her hand before passing off the glass to the nearest person and wiping her mouth on the back of her hand.

“Yeah let’s get out of here. I’ll get my driver.”

“You don’t have to leave your own party early—" Daisy attempts, but Melinda waves her off.

“It doesn’t need me to be a party. Let’s go.”

Trip says he’s good to stick around and come to the hotel with the others—apparently he’s hit it off with one of Melinda’s backup singers—so Jemma, Daisy, and Melinda pile into the back of the SUV without him while Hunter and Bobbi ride up front. Melinda leans heavily on Daisy’s side, her fingers lacing meaningfully into Daisy’s, something that makes her stomach flutter with anticipation. Jemma shoots her a knowing look once but when Daisy nods reassuringly, her friend says nothing.

At the hotel, Bobbi leads them to the elevator while passing out room keys. Daisy notes her matching number with Jemma’s, but once out of the elevator, Melinda pulls her in the direction of her own room.

“I’ve got your bag, Daisy when you need it!” Jemma calls after her, and Daisy nearly grins to herself. _She’s such a bro._

Melinda doesn’t waste any time once her door has closed behind them. Daisy has barely stuffed her room key in her pocket before Melinda’s hands are on her sides, pressing her back against the wall and kissing her soundly. Daisy weaves her fingers into Melinda’s hair and kisses her back just as eagerly, distantly registering as Melinda’s tongue brushes hers that she can taste alcohol on it…One of Melinda’s legs presses between her thighs and Daisy sighs into her mouth as she grinds down against the friction, an action that abruptly reminds her how badly she needs a bathroom, having not seen one since they left the plane.

“Hey, give me a second,” Daisy says as Melinda’s mouth falls to her neck, and Daisy presses her gently back in order to squirm free. “Bathroom—be right back.”

She ducks under the woman’s arm as she leans heavily against the wall, laughing softly as Daisy disappears into the nearest bathroom. She takes her time after peeing, using a damp washcloth to wipe the worst of the sweat from her neck and armpits before reaching for the lock on the door again. By the time she gets out, Melinda has made her way to the nearest sofa and has sunk into a corner of it, sprawling gracelessly with one leg up on the cushion.

“Melinda?” Daisy calls, but the woman doesn’t move as she approaches, doesn’t even turn her head. Perplexed, Daisy reaches out and strokes her bare shoulder, but Melinda still doesn’t react, only breathing deeply in sleep. Daisy waits a moment longer, waits to see if this is a joke, but when Melinda still doesn’t stir, Daisy heads for the door.

Bobbi opens Jemma’s door, surprisingly, and Daisy can’t quite tell what conversation she has interrupted between Jemma and the driver, since Jemma’s accent has gone characteristically thick the way it always does when she meets more native Brits.

“Daisy?” Jemma calls when she catches sight of her in the doorway. “What’s on—you need your bag?”

Daisy bites her lip before answering.

“She uh…I think Melinda sat down on the sofa when I went to the bathroom—but now I can’t wake her up.”

Bobbi closes her eyes and exhales a curse with her sigh, but she strides purposefully through the door, plucking the card key from Daisy’s surprised hand on the way. She and Jemma follow after the woman back down to Melinda’s door, and Bobbi doesn’t even knock before entering with the key.

“Mel?” she calls as she approaches the sofa, but the singer doesn’t even stir in response. Leaning down, Bobbi scratches gently at Melinda’s side with her fingernails, but when the older woman only twitches reflexively, the blonde sighs and bends to pull the woman’s arm over her shoulder and lift her into her arms.

“Well, I guess that’s curtain for tonight,” she grumbles as she turns in the direction of the bedroom, Melinda still motionless against her chest.

“She was drinking everything people were trying to give me,” Daisy stammers helplessly as she trots after the tall woman. “She probably just had a little too much tonight…”

“Tonight?” Bobbi scoffs as she backs through a bedroom door with Melinda limp in her arms. “Oh no, honey. This is most nights, for her.”

Bobbi isn’t being rough with Melinda as she lays her down on the king-sized bed and maneuvers her head onto a pillow, but the movements as she pulls off her shoes and extracts the phone from Melinda’s pocket aren’t exactly tender.

“I’m sorry you had to see it, but this has been pretty routine on this tour,” Bobbi mutters as she unfolds the blanket from the foot of the bed and pulls it up to Melinda’s shoulders. “No worse than she ever is.”

Duty done, the assistant straightens up, brushing past Daisy towards the door.

“I’ll tell you one thing, though,” she says, pausing on the threshold to look back at Daisy. “She’s never brought another singer on stage before. And it’s been a long time since I saw her sing like that.”

Jemma lingers as Bobbi leaves the hotel room unceremoniously, and Daisy meets her best friend’s eyes hesitantly.

“I wasn’t expecting that…” she whispers, biting her lip, and Jemma immediately moves closer.

“It’s not your fault,” she says firmly, slipping her arm around Daisy’s waist and leading her towards the door. “You can talk about it in the morning. For now, you should come use our spa of a bathroom and get some rest. Maybe before we go to bed, we can call Fitz and tell him what he missed out on.”

Daisy glances back at Melinda once more before they leave the room together. The woman continues to lie motionless on the bed, oblivious to everything outside of her dreams. 

~

Melinda’s headache is a dull roar when she wakes up alone the next morning, groping for her phone out of habit and finding it on her nightstand. The first thing that she sees is that it’s already 9 a.m. local time, and there’s a single message from Bobbi waiting.

 _Guests’ flight is booked for 1:20pm today,_ the message reads. _If you wake up before Hunter takes them to the airport at 10, the girls are in 1038 and the guy is in 1046._

The part of the message that says, _Nice move, passing out on your guests,_ is simply understood, and Melinda grimaces as she tries to move quickly out of bed and get to her feet. Her head pounds unsympathetically, but she’s used to that by now. She first grabs the hotel phone and orders a room service breakfast for two, then staggers to the bathroom to brush her teeth. She’s still in last night’s afterparty clothes, but she just shoves her dirty hair into a ponytail and heads down the hall.

Luckily, it’s Daisy who answers the door at 1038.

“Hey,” Melinda says, smiling at the sight of her. “Glad you’re still here. Have you had breakfast?”

Daisy nods, not stepping back to invite her in. “Jemma and I ordered up. I hope that’s okay.”

“Of course. Everything’s on me,” Melinda reminds her. “I know we don’t have much time before you have to leave, but do you want to come back to my room for a little bit?”

She doubts she needs to spell it out for Daisy, and maybe that’s why the young woman seems hesitant.

“I just want to talk,” Melinda adds quickly, not wanting to push too far.

Daisy looks back, half closing the door on Melinda, and she hears the soft murmur of a second female voice. A moment later, Daisy finally steps out barefoot, tucking her room key in her pocket. Her hair looks freshly washed and she smells faintly of complimentary bath salts, but she’s also wearing black pants that smell like fried food and a camisole that is frayed around the edges.

It’s a damn good look on her.

The food still hasn’t arrived as Melinda invites her in, so she leads Daisy to the sofa area, where the girl sits cautiously, though not on the same piece of furniture as Melinda.

“You were awesome last night,” Melinda leads off, drawing one leg up beneath herself as she curls into the closest corner of the sofa to Daisy.

The girl brightens at these words, pulling her phone from her pocket.

“I had so many notifications this morning,” she says, unlocking the device and showing Melinda the screen. “Seems like a lot of people filmed it, and then some more people found my Youtube page…”

A video is already pulled up, making Melinda wonder how many times Daisy has already watched it, an idea that makes her smile. She takes the phone and watches the clip, a recording from a spectator at floor level of her and Daisy singing their duet, occasionally drowned out by the cheers of the audience around the videographer. Melinda had been situated slightly behind Daisy for most of the performance, but in this video she can see clearly how nervous Daisy was, can see the way she often closed her eyes or looked down rather than at the audience…

_And yet she absolutely killed it._

Smiling, Melinda scrolls down to the comments section, hoping the public was wise enough to agree.

**_AAAAAA NEW SONG! I can already tell that this is her next No. 1!!!_ **

**_Get that girl a record deal already!_ **

**_I was at this concert! They were awesome!_ **

**_Here’s the girl’s page if anyone wants it! link:youtube.com/daisyjohnsonsingsincali_ **

**_OMG that EYE SEX tho~_ **

“You should be so proud of yourself,” she says as she hands the phone back to Daisy. “You’re a natural.”

Daisy shakes her head. “If it weren’t for the insanity blowing up in my notifications, I’d still probably think this was all a dream. Thanks for making this happen.”

Melinda smiles, reaching over to brush her fingertips over Daisy’s arm. “I think the world was waiting for your twelve notes."

Their eyes meet, and Daisy smiles softly, though she doesn’t return the touch. A sudden knock on the door signals the arrival of room service though, and Melinda quickly gets up to answer the door for it.

Melinda moves the plates to the table and gestures for Daisy to join her, pouring her a cup of coffee from the provided carafe and taking a seat at her elbow.

“Help yourself to anything—I ordered for two,” Melinda says as she fills a plate for herself. Daisy reaches for the fruit plate without being prompted a second time, pulling the dish closer and immediately starting in on the strawberries.

“It’s things like this that I miss most, what with not having a fridge,” she says, seeming perfectly aware of Melinda’s amused gaze. “Berries and cut fruit.”

“Well, if last night’s performance was anything to go by, it won’t be long before you can afford at least a condo.”

Daisy brightens but looks away. “Do you really think that’s possible?” she asks hesitantly. “People go viral every other day—do you really think I could get any kind of record deal out of this?”

Melinda smiles as she takes a bite of omelet, gently prodding Daisy’s foot beneath the table. “I would say check your email and keep putting out new music, and it should be only a matter of time.”

A quiet moment passes as Melinda eats a little more and forces down a coffee of her own (it’s still her least favorite thing but she’s going to need it with this hangover…), and eventually, she sets her fork down.

“Would you come on tour with us?”

Daisy seems stunned as she looks up, and Melinda smiles.

“We’ve got about two weeks of tour dates left, so it wouldn’t be that long of a commitment, if you’re not wanting to be gone from LA long. Obviously everyone loved you last night, and with a little more planning we could let you sing more of your stuff—you could open for me, or just come on in the middle for a few numbers…”

“That…I honestly can’t believe you’re offering me that,” Daisy breathes.

Emboldened, Melinda reaches over and puts her hand on Daisy’s. “Don’t get on the plane today. Stay. I really want you to stay.”

Daisy looks down at those words, and Melinda thinks she’s just being shy as she rubs her fingers meaningfully over the girl’s skin.

“By the way, I’m really sorry I passed out on you last night,” she suddenly remembers to say, meeting Daisy’s eyes as the girl looks up. “I obviously wasn't planning on that happening…”

“I know,” Daisy says quietly. She doesn’t say _It’s okay._

“Can we have a do-over later?” Melinda asks boldly. “I’d hate to be judged by my worst performance.”

Daisy now bites her lip and looks downwards again. Her hands finally move, reaching for Melinda’s, but when Melinda leans forward to kiss her, Daisy stops her, leaning back.

“Hold on. I need to talk to you about something first… before I can answer your other question too.”

Daisy is visibly nervous, but she doesn’t let go of Melinda’s hand as she turns in her chair to face her fully. She hesitates a moment longer, then takes a deep breath.

“How long has your drinking been this bad?”

Disarmed, Melinda can’t even speak for a moment.

“I had a little too much last night,” she finally says, shrugging.

“Sure, but the night I met you…I could taste the alcohol when I kissed you then, too. And Bobbi said last night that this isn’t the first time even this week that you’ve ended the day by blacking out. That’s stage two alcoholism, Mel, and it’s not a good place to be.”

Realizing this conversation is definitely not going how she thought it would, Melinda pulls her hand out of Daisy’s and leans back, crossing her arms while making a note to give Bobbi an earful later.

“It’s not an addiction; I can quit whenever—"

“But you’re definitely not in a good place,” Daisy cuts her off, now looking away again. “Either way, I don’t think I can do this with you.”

Annoyed, Melinda rolls her eyes.

“Jesus, Daisy, I wasn’t asking you to marry me—”

But Daisy only shakes her head, gaze drifting downwards, her voice growing softer.

“Melinda… I can’t walk down this road again.”

She looks up, and Melinda is shocked to see tears in her eyes. Her brow only crinkles in response, and Daisy glances down again as she moves her hand to the neck of her camisole, dipping into the cup of her bra and pulling out the sobriety chip that Melinda had seen before. She lays it on the table between them like a line in the sand, and Melinda waits uneasily.

“Do you remember the night you met me, when I showed you this and I told you how I almost died a few years back?” Daisy asks, touching the chip with one finger.

Melinda nods slowly.

“Well, that wasn’t from an overdose; it wasn’t from binge-drinking,” Daisy pauses to swallow, then continues with a quiver in her voice. “I had a boyfriend back then who was ‘trying’ about as hard as I was to get sober, but we were both doing a bad job of it. I was his enabler, and he was mine; neither of us could really support the other. I got in a bad state at a night out with friends one night and called him to come pick me up, but turned out that he was drunk too. We got in a bad car accident on the way home—ended up wrapped around a telephone pole. I almost died…and he _did_.”

Shocked and ashamed, Melinda closes her eyes, sighing internally.

_Goddammit Melinda…_

“The truth is, I’ve thought about you all the time since that night we met,” Daisy admits, finally meeting Melinda’s eyes again when she opens hers. “I think I _am_ falling for you. But just because you love someone doesn’t mean you can save them. I can’t be the support you need to do better, and I’m not willing to be your enabler and look the other way when I see you doing this to yourself. But it feels like right now, you don’t even see a problem, and we don’t even have a place to start.”

Unable to form a reply, Melinda only stares at her, watching as Daisy picks up the chip and slips it back into her bra.

“I’m sorry—I know this isn’t what you want to hear, because I never wanted to hear it either. I do care about you, and I don’t want this for you. But I also know that I can’t make you change—you have to decide that for yourself.”

Daisy abruptly stands, moving towards the door.

“Thanks for everything you did for me, but I’m sorry I can’t give you what you want.”

Melinda remains unmoving in her chair as she hears the room’s door open.

“Let me know if you’re ever in LA.”

She doesn’t respond, and eventually, she hears the door close, sealing her in with the emptiness again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, if you’ve seen the film, you know this is how it goes after the concert (as far as the rockstar passing out and her knowing from the beginning that he’s not in a good place), and everything goes south from there. Having Daisy call Melinda our and then walk away is where the major divergence starts, and we’ll have to see where they go from here.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Like Cinderella after the ball--back to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning in this chapter for drug/alcohol abuse and references of car accidents.

Daisy wakes up back in her van the following morning, the backstage pass on the floor beside her shining like a glass slipper, the only physical remnant of the out-of-body experience of two nights ago. The alarm on her phone is snarling at her to get up and moving in order to be at her morning shift on time, so she squirms into her slacks and buttons on her white work shirt before climbing into the driver’s seat to head to the diner.

She’s confused at first by the crowd she sees milling around the entrance as she parks her van in the back and pushes her hair into a ponytail, checking her makeup in the driver’s mirror. It’s barely dawn, and usually they don’t have much of a breakfast crowd until closer to eight a.m.

As she climbs out of the car, her apron tucked into one elbow, someone suddenly materializes in front of her.

“Daisy! This way! Look at me! Daisy!”

A camera is flashing and clicking, and Daisy stands stunned like a deer in the headlights for several seconds, blinking in confusion.

“Wha…”

The shouting has brought more people running though, and suddenly there’s an absolute swarm of cameras in every direction as she stumbles, half-blind, towards the back door of the diner. Rosalind, seeming to have heard the commotion, suddenly appears, holding the back door open and pulling her through it.

“Employees only back here!” the woman snaps as some people try to shove their madly-clicking cameras through the door after her. “Back off!”

Once the metal door slams shut, Daisy exhales, putting a steadying hand on the ice machine.

“I’m so sorry, Roz, I didn’t know…”

“I figured you didn’t. It’s okay. They’ve been camped out since before dawn. Now clock in and get to work.”

The photographers thankfully stay out of the restaurant, but Daisy still keeps her head down all morning, aware that some are still shooting pictures through the glass. On her break, she stays seated on a milk carton in the pantry rather than risking venturing outside like she usually would. She devours a plate of leftovers from the morning breakfast rush while texting to Jemma, who is thankfully able to swing by on her lunch break a little while later.

“Do you think it’s all because of the concert?” she asks across the bar as she sips the coffee she’d bought as an excuse to sit there.

“What else could it be? Melinda didn’t tweet anything about where I work, did she?”

Jemma quirks a brow. “You mean to tell me you didn’t check her twitter today?”

“No,” Daisy says immediately, blushing as she wipes down a counter. “You do it. I’m on the clock.”

Jemma pulls out her phone while Daisy moves to take the order of a small table of elderly patrons by the windows.

“They sure are interested in you,” one of them comments as he hands her back a menu, acknowledging that have been shooting through the windows since she approached. “Are you someone we oughta know?”

“Nope, not yet,” Daisy says with what she hopes is a friendly smile, hustling back behind the counter to put in their orders.

“She hasn’t posted anything in a few days,” Jemma says the next time Daisy is able to swing by her seat. “Her last tweet was the one about your webpage.”

“Well, maybe between that and the concert, everyone’s just curious. Hopefully this is a one-time thing.”

“Do you want me to stick around until your shift is over and help get you safely to your car?” Jemma offers, but Daisy shakes her head.

“You don’t need to do that. I’d hate for you to get in trouble at work.”

“I’m too valuable to fire,” Jemma says, flashing a grin. “Remember? I’m the boss.”

“All right, well if your boss can spare you…”

An hour later, Jemma throws her cardigan over Daisy’s head and leads her out of the building, guiding her through the crowd to her van and blocking her while Daisy climbs into it. Jemma gets in on the other side, almost taking a lens off a camera as she shuts the door. They’re still trying hard to shoot through the windshield as Daisy backs carefully through the crowd, her hands clammy.

“I think we’d better drive around for a little while before I drop you at work—wouldn’t want anyone following us and hassling you there.”

That afternoon, Daisy drives almost out to Encino before parking her van in a motel lot to camp out for the night. She has enough food stored in her car that she doesn’t need to show her face tonight, so instead she holes up with her phone and slowly starts sifting through the emails she’s been ignoring for the past couple of days.

Plenty are fans, plenty are critical, some are gross, but there are a handful that Daisy should have been expecting but is still surprised by.

_Ms. Johnson, My name is xxxxxxx and I am write for Entertainment Magazine…_

_Ms. Johnson, My name is xxxxxxx and I write for the Los Angeles Times…_

_Ms. Johnson, My name is xxxxxx and I work with the ABC news station…_

She eventually puts her phone out of sight without responding to a single one. Opening her laptop, she cracks easily into the motel’s wifi and logs onto her Youtube page. Besides the thousands of new followers and views and responses to her videos, her name comes up with twice the number of video hits it did yesterday, most of them uploads from concert-goers’ phone cameras, but there’s already an Entertainment Tonight spot about her appearance in the middle of Melinda’s concert, a barely-a-minute featurette that apparently aired last night. The network obviously dug up what little they could on her—her YouTube presence and past performances at local bars—while mentioning the crowd’s enthusiastic response to the song she “apparently wrote”. Daisy bristles a little at that phrasing, thinks for a little while, and then climbs back into the driver’s seat.

Parked next to the beach, Daisy sets up her computer on top of her car and records herself singing “Shallow” with her guitar, gulls flying overhead and waves crashing behind her. She also records a quick hello, introducing herself and the song, and then climbs back into her car to edit the two clips together. Before she leaves the beach to head back to the motel lot, she changes into a swimsuit and takes a towel plus the shampoo and soap she’d brought home from the hotel to one of the beach showers for a shower that should tide her over for the next few days.

~

As of tonight, Melinda’s tour is over, and it shows. She hasn’t gotten up from the floor in…a while, and her body is still working overtime to process the things she’s put in it in the past few hours. Bobbi finds her like that, sprawled on the carpet of her hotel room, halfway between a table full of empty bottles and broken mirror.

“Hotel staff called me because they were concerned,” Bobbi says, carefully picking her way over the pieces of a broken chair as she approaches.

“Get out,” Melinda grumbles, unmoving on the floor.

“Booze, pills, a trashed hotel room…Looks like rock-star bingo in here…”

Melinda attempts to scowl, aware of how powerless she is to enforce any orders. “Morse, if you don’t want to fight me or fuck me, then get the hell out of my room.”

Bobbi leans down near Melinda’s head, waving one of the orange pill bottles from the table in her face. “How many of these did you take?”

Melinda closes her eyes, sinking further into the swirling carpet. “I dunno.”

“Then I guess I’m staying until you sober up or I have to call an ambulance.”

Melinda forces her eyes open to glare at the woman. “I could fire you.”

Bobbi seems unimpressed as she sits down next to her. “You sure could.”

They both know she doesn’t have the strength—she’d lose her and Hunter together, and she’ll likely never find a pair as committed as the two of them.

Eventually, the need to vomit overrides her pride, and Melinda tries to move one arm underneath herself in order to resume crawling to the bathroom.

“Help me,” she grumbles, and Bobbi finally moves, unfolding her long legs and climbing to her feet, hurrying to get a bath towel to lay over the broken mirror fragments between them and the bathroom. They make it there with Bobbi more or less dragging her, Melinda barely managing to shuffle her feet. Inside, Bobbi props her against the toilet and pulls her hair back just in time. Melinda lets everything come back up, then sticks her finger back in her mouth again to force the rest of it out. Bobbi holds her hair back until she stops gagging, then wets a washcloth under the sink and lays it over her neck. She offers Melinda water, waits until she’s ready to move, and then helps her to bed.

After Melinda’s propped on her side and covered in a duvet with a trash can beside the bed, Bobbi sends a few messages from her phone before lying down on top of the covers next to her.

“You can go,” Melinda grumbles, already drifting off, but Bobbi doesn’t move, just sighs towards the ceiling.

“Doesn’t she make you want to do better?”

~

It’s been two weeks since her performance at Melinda’s concert, and thankfully, the press attention has already fallen off—no papers or magazines seem interested in a tenth picture of her walking into work in her gross uniform or going about her daily life. She’d had to evade pursuit in her van more than once, and because of that, she’d slept in different locations every single night.

Maria’s bar is another story, though. When she’d shown up for her first performance since the aborted one the night of the concert, Daisy had been shocked to see a line out the door, a line that exploded into cheers as she approached. She and her friends sang to a packed house that night and every night they’ve been there since then. After each performance, people have stayed to ask for pictures, ask for autographs, make wild assumptions about her career taking off, and make her smile. A few reporters have tracked her down there, and Daisy eventually submitted to a single interview with all of them at once, given around a crowded bar table after all the performers were done singing.

“How did you meet Melinda May?”

“She was here in this bar after her concert in LA a few weeks ago.”

“What is the nature of your relationship?”

“We just saw each other that one time before the concert of hers that I went to. She saw me sing here.”

“Did you sing ‘Shallow’ that night?”

“Not on stage. But I played it for her later when she asked if I wrote my own songs.”

“What is your singing background?”

“Self-taught. I have one shitty guitar from my teen years. Was in a band out here for a hot second but we didn’t even make it far enough to record anything.”

“What’s next for you?”

“I have no idea. I kind of still can’t believe this happened.”

“Will you be seeing Melinda May again?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you heard from her?”

“No. Not since the Seattle concert.”

On the third night that she’s back at Maria’s, a new person had approached Daisy with an offer to play a solo set at his bar the following night…for pay. She took the offer, spent all day practicing her covers and her old songs, then played to an appreciative audience. That night, she updated her Youtube page to include a link to a website she’s finally set up—her own page with her videos, resume, and a ‘contact’ tab.

Her second is at a different bar, then her third at yet another. Whenever she checked her email, there was at least three new requests waiting, and her schedule started filling up. Playing and singing, she could make in an hour what usually took her a six-hour shift at the diner to clean, and since Roz wasn’t being very understanding of her need for evenings off, Daisy eventually took the initiative to quit. YouTube advertisers had already contacted her, and if that pans out, it could be a game-changer.

“You know, you really should get a demo recorded,” Maria tells her one night when she’s back at the woman’s bar for another open-mic night. It’s close to two and the place has already emptied out, but Daisy has stayed later than usual to catch up with her old friends. Maria has never really said much to Daisy in the past, so this advice seems to come out of left field.

“What would I do with a demo?”

Maria never looks up from the glasses she’s drying. “If you’re getting the offers I suspect you are, I hope you aren’t going to waste your shot. Get a demo made, get yourself an agent, and then get on that opportunity before it disappears.”

When the articles from her interview are posted, Daisy reads every one of them, then quickly realizes she probably shouldn’t. Of course, any good reporters had also dug into her online presence, her public record background (which includes her near-death car accident), and her local acquaintances. Other girls from the bar had told the reporters how Melinda went back in the dressing room to meet her and how they had left together. Someone else told them how Melinda’s driver had fetched them from Maria’s the night of the concert.

The stories are messy, but then again, so is she.

Several of the articles note that Melinda May “could not be reached for comment”. It hasn’t escaped Daisy that the woman’s Twitter account has also gone completely silent. Her tour would have ended two weeks ago, so Daisy has no idea what she might be doing now.

That evening at Jemma’s, her friend invites her out on their tiny balcony while Fitz finishes washing dishes.

“So you read the articles too?” she mutters, sure that’s what Jemma wants to ask.

“How are you feeling about them?” her friend says in response.

“I mean, none of it was untrue. It’s just pretty strange knowing how much someone could learn about me with a simple google search. And knowing that anyone who knows me personally could know all that from these articles now too.”

“Have you heard from Melinda at all?”

“Nope.”

Of course, Jemma knows exactly what Daisy said in her last conversation with Melinda, and why hearing from her probably is still unlikely.

“Do you want to talk to her?”

Daisy sighs. “I don’t think it matters if I do—she wants something I’m not going to sign up for. I’m not willing to walk through another Lincoln.”

“If that weren’t the case…”

“If she was sober, she probably wouldn’t want to be with me anyway.”

That night, Daisy stays outside long after her friends have gone to bed, strumming chords and singing softly to herself, scribbling notes in her phone until the song comes together. The next morning after Fitz and Jemma leave for work, Daisy sets up her computer on the counter and records the whole thing, posting it immediately on her YouTube page and titling it “Before I Cry”.

With no work to hurry off to, Daisy stays at the table and writes five more songs, the most work she’s ever done in a single day, and records them all while the wifi is good. By the time afternoon rolls around, she’s committed to going to an office supply store and picking up some thumb drives to serve as demos…if she can find anyone who wants them.

She’s in the middle of the highway when the radio DJ announces a new single from Melinda May, and Daisy jerks the steering wheel involuntarily. She makes it off the highway and into a parking lot safely, but not before the song is halfway over.

_“Please don’t tell me I’m too far gone…_

_I can’t go on if I’m not living in your arms…”_

Daisy listens to the whole song, then quickly searches for it online and proceeds to listen to it three more times. Her hands are shaking slightly, and she balls them into fists, pressing them against her eyes.

_She didn’t write it for you. She did it for the buzz. Don’t turn this isn’t something it’s not._

That night when she takes the stage at another new bar, Daisy debuts “Before I Cry” and one of the other songs she wrote that afternoon, whose working title is “I Don’t Know What Love Is.” Both are well received, which solidifies Daisy’s decision to take Maria’s advice and get a demo out there.

When she leaves the back room a little while with her guitar case, Daisy nearly collides with a woman waiting near the door.

“Daisy Johnson?” the woman says, stepping in front of her intentionally.

Daisy props her guitar case upright between the two of them. “That’s me.”

The woman sticks out her hand. “Isabelle Hartley. I was wondering if you were looking for an agent.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Before I Cry" is on the soundtrack for A Star Is Born and is seriously a great song. I don't think it made it into the final cut of the movie tho.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Catching up with where Melinda's been.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content/trigger warnings in this chapter for references to: alcoholism, underage drinking, heroin, death of family members, and rehab.
> 
> Special thanks for Florchis for beta-reading and cheerleading this chapter's progress. <3

Melinda May sits in a darkened room, leaning her head heavily against the music holder on an old upright piano. The headache of the first few days has passed, but she is still getting used to the loudness of her thoughts in the absence of their usual silencers. Pressing the keys gently, Melinda draws out chords as softly as possible, trying not to add too much to the noise.

The music is just loud enough, apparently, because a few minutes after she begins, a door behind her opens, throwing a square of yellow light onto the wall in front of her.

“Can’t sleep either?”

Melinda doesn’t acknowledge Kara, the dark-haired young woman who had checked in the same day as herself. She seems tolerable enough, but Melinda isn’t really looking to make friends here. Kara seems undaunted, however, sitting down on the nearby sofa and lighting a cigarette as Melinda continues to play to herself without singing. When she finally stops, neither of them speak until Melinda takes her hands off the keys, though her head remains bowed over them.

“Does playing help much?” Kara asks quietly.

Melinda sighs without lifting her head. “A little. It’s better than being silent.”

Kara nods, releasing a lungful of smoke into the already-gray room.

“Think you’ll get a few songs out of this?”

Melinda sighs as she closes the lid of the piano. “It’s sure not what I’m here for, but it’s probably a safe bet.”

She stands slowly, heading for the door, but Kara calls after her from the sofa. “Yeah, no one checks into rehab just for a story to tell at parties.”

~

For the first few days, everything had felt like _too much_ and _not enough_. The unsatisfied cravings, the persistent addictions demanding acknowledgement, the chaos in her mind that she couldn’t turn to her usual vices to dull—Melinda had expected that. She was ready for a mental and physical battle and was committed to winning.

No one had warned her until she’d begun just how _thankless_ that fight would feel when mentally winning out over addiction felt, physically anyway, like losing.

 _You’re not losing—the addiction is losing,_ one of the oft-repeated phrases used by the staff would remind her. But when you’ve lived with an addiction for so long, it can be hard to make that distinction. Her body was losing while her will was winning, and she had hoped that this would feel more satisfying than it actually was.

The facility she had chosen was not the swankiest of options—she had wanted privacy, but she hadn’t wanted the isolation. The property had several small apartments organized around a community area. There was a pool, a small library, a large dining room (with a piano), a fitness center, an art room, and some walking trails down to a rocky private beach. The place had assured Melinda of her privacy and allowed her legal team to make everyone (staff and residents) sign non-disclosure agreements. That was enough for her. She had packed her own bags and signed herself in. Bobbi had squeezed her hand just before she left and murmured some encouraging words, and then Melinda was solidly alone with the future.

Two months was the minimum commitment. Since she had started binge-drinking when she was twelve years old, the detoxing was an absolute nightmare. She had always considered herself lucky to not have gotten hooked on something “more dangerous” like heroin, even after running in rock’n’roll circles for her entire life, but the whole process did not let her forget how badly she had treated her body by giving it whatever it wanted for so long. Now, between the headaches, the nausea, the loud thoughts demanding satisfaction throughout sleepless nights of insomnia, she feels like she’s paying double for every drink she’s ever taken.

She’d straightened out during her brief stint in the Air Force, two decades ago already. When Nick and Vic had been killed, she’d fallen off the wagon hard. Initially, it had not been difficult to drink less than she did those first few months after their deaths (and, years later, Phil’s death), but most of the time, Melinda had not tried hard to moderate herself. She had  a lifestyle and a wallet that let her get away with it and plenty of things she didn’t want to take time to think about it.

Now, all she had was time.

Everyone in her program had a different story and different reasons for reaching this point, but their counselors were good at not letting them turn into excuses. Excuses were the opposite of responsibility. Excuses were enablers.

 _You have to do this for yourself,_ the counselor, a woman named Sharon, said more than once in their sessions. _Becoming an alcoholic was a self-centered act. Whatever happens to your relationships after you leave here, staying sober has to be something you do for_ you _._

After week six, they were allowed visitors, and Melinda was surprised to hear that Saturday that Mack and Elena had arrived together to see her.

“You look good,” Elena says after hugging her, sitting down at the small table in the dining room with her. Mack fills one side of the table easily, and Melinda angles her chair so that she can look at both of them as she talks.

“Thanks,” she says taking in the tans both of them have acquired since she last saw them. “You all look like you’ve been traveling.”

Mack smiles. “Yeah, we spent a few weeks down in Colombia with Elena’s family. Her sister just had a baby.”

“Aw, do you have pictures?” Melinda offers.

Elena seems a little surprised, but she pulls out her phone immediately, and Melinda spends the next few minutes smiling over pictures of Elena’s family, hometown, and new nephew. She’s conscious of how many of these names and stories are brand new information—she’s never bothered to ask about most of her bandmates’ lives apart from the ways they immediately intersected hers.

“He’s precious,” she agrees after a twentieth photo of the infant in question, and Elena thankfully runs out of pictures not long after that.

“So how’ve you been?” Mack says carefully as Elena puts her phone away. He leans over the table on his elbows, a stance Melinda appreciates. Too many people have tried to look casual or nonchalant when talking to her about anything personal, but Mack has always been direct.

“It’s been draining,” she answers, returning his directness. “But I hope I’m over the worst of it. Detox is a thirsty bitch.”

Elena makes a confused-but-sympathetic face. “Are you being treated well?”

Melinda nods. “It’s a pretty good set-up. The price tag of this place means there are lots of other rich, entitled people like me here. Can be a blessing and a curse.”

“How much longer do you think you’ll stay?” Mack asks, and Melinda shrugs.

“At least another month. I don’t feel ready to be back on my own yet.”

The program has been clear that counseling, AA/NA meetings, and her relationship with her sponsor should continue indefinitely after her stay here ends. Bobbi has already been in charge of cleaning all the drugs and alcohol out of her home while she’s been away. And yet, the idea of being only a phone call away from a relapse still sounds too intimidating to consider right now.

“I’m glad you made the commitment,” Elena says, brushing a hand briefly over Melinda’s elbow. “I can’t think of anything that won’t be improved.”

Melinda is glad she doesn’t say, “easier”, because choosing to improve the rest of her life has literally made every day harder.

“Thanks,” she says, meeting her eyes. “I appreciate you saying that.”

The rest of their visit is pretty pleasant—they take a walk down to the beach together, quietly getting to know each other all over again. Melinda has been warned about this plenty—the suspicion her loved ones might feel about her sobriety, the need for a well-deserved apology, the long work of rebuilding things that addictions had broken—none of this is a surprise. But the mercy her bandmates are showing her right now is.

When it’s time for them to leave, both of them hug her, an action that surprises Melinda so much that it brings tears to her eyes.

“You can do this,” Elena whispers over her shoulder, squeezing her tight. “I believe in you.”

Melinda doesn’t let the tears fall until after she waves goodbye.

~

Kara leaves the program at the two-month mark.

She’s not sentimental, doesn’t say goodbye to anyone, and Melinda doesn’t find out until she shows up for the day’s group session and finds her gone.

No one is here against their will—but some are less willing to stay than others.

Today they’re talking about dating, relationships, and marriage in the context of recovery. There are three people here who are married (not to someone also here, of course), and they share plenty of cautionary tales. Most of the group members have been in and out of plenty of relationships in the midst of their unhealthy lifestyle, but now everyone has to re-learn the intricacies of intimacy without the influences of alcohol.

“If you are not currently in a committed romantic relationship, we do recommend that you plan to wait until you’ve been sober for at least a year before you pursue a relationship, or even casually date,” their group leader says. “The risk of co-dependency is high, and as you’ve heard us say before, you’re barely helping yourself if you just replace one addiction with another. Sometimes those crutches are people.”

Melinda remains mostly silent for the session, just listening to everyone else talk and trying to fathom what circumstances could entice anyone sensible into a relationship with a recovering alcoholic/addict, even years down the road. Wouldn’t the suspense always be there, lurking over both of your shoulders, a reminder that there used to be something you loved more than any person in your life?

She got her phone back briefly in her sixth week—in a monitored counseling session, and only so she could delete the contacts and make a list of people she needed to ask Bobbi to remove from her future crew. She was allowed, at that time, to check her email, and although Sharon, her counselor, was sitting at her elbow watching her, Melinda knew she didn’t really understand the significance of the weekly emails her agent had sent her of the billboard charts throughout the past two months. A certain name was slowly creeping up the list, right next to a single titled “Before I Cry.”

In her better moments, Melinda is happy for her. A single means a recording deal. A recording deal probably means an agent. An agent means a real start in the business. But the inconsequence of her absence stings like the snap of a sobering rubber band on her wrist.

_She didn’t need you. You just gave her the stage she always deserved. She certainly won’t need your help now._

Back in her room later, Melinda reaches for the notebook that has become the landing place for all the words she can’t keep in her head alone. She has no idea what the song sounds like, but she writes the words at the top of a blank page, and lets her own version of the idea come out, a vague tune backing the lyrics in her mind.

That night, she goes down to the piano and tries out the chords, humming the melody to herself beneath them. Tonight, no one interrupts her.

No one comes to rehab for the creative process, but she’s thankful for it all the same.

~

_To thine own self be true_

Melinda has read those words around the edge of the chip enough times that she can read them like braille even when the chip is in her pocket. The numbers have gotten higher every time she’s traded them in, and the one in her pocket now has _3 months_ stamped on it. She keeps one hand clenched around it in her pocket while she waits for her visitor in the dining room.

She has no idea why she’s nervous—this woman has seen her at her lowest, why is she afraid for her to see her at her best?

Bobbi, for her part, looks a little nervous too as she walks through the doors. She’s alone, which Melinda had requested, and she has a purse over one shoulder. It’s strange to see her without a phone or clipboard or a Bluetooth headset, and this alone makes Melinda smile.

“Hi,” she says, standing up and meeting Bobbi in the middle of the room. “Thanks for coming.”

They don’t hug—for all the personal moments they’ve shared, their relationship has been dramatically one-sided. Bobbi smiles but doesn’t say anything, waiting for a cue from Melinda on what to do.

“Come sit down,” Melinda says, for starters.

Bobbi waits somewhat expectantly as they sit for Melinda to speak first, so she takes a deep breath.

“I um…I know there are a lot of things I need to apologize for. Not the least of which is how thankless your job has been for the past year. I want you to know that I’m really sorry for all the things I’ve put you through. I put you in some terrible positions that you didn’t deserve, and just because they were my choices doesn’t mean they were only affecting me. And I’m so, so sorry for how much I put you through, too.”

Bobbi nods, her blue gaze intense on Melinda’s, but she still doesn’t respond, so Melinda continues.

“I also want to thank you,” she says quietly, lacing her hands together beneath the table, “for not quitting your job, even after I stopped listening to you. I know I made your work difficult, but you kept trying to get me to make better choices, even when I dismissed you. And that…that was important. I see that now. And you may have actually saved my life that last night of the tour when you didn’t leave. I wouldn’t have blamed you for bowing out at any point in all that…but you didn’t. You’re a really special person, and I’m grateful for what you did.”

Bobbi nods again, looking down at her own lap, and sighs.

“Thank you for saying that. I do appreciate you acknowledging all of that. It was hard, and I did come close to quitting several times.”

“Can I ask why you didn’t?”

Bobbi looks up, offering a hint of a smile that seems an attempt to cover something else. “I was afraid that it would make you worse. And I did care about you. I was just afraid that some time after I had quit I would hear that you died of an overdose or something equally terrible. I didn’t want to be even passively responsible for that.”

Understanding this feels like a fist around Melinda’s stomach. _Toxic. That was the definition of a toxic relationship. Even if it was professional._

“I am so, _so_ sorry,” she repeats. “You didn’t deserve that, and I’m so sorry that you even had to think like that.”

Bobbi looks down again, biting her lip, and when she speaks again there’s a catch in her throat.

“I’m really glad you’re doing better. I know you didn’t do it for me, but it’s such a relief.”

Melinda reaches across the table, just setting her hand near Bobbi, not sure if it’s the right thing to do but willing to risk it. When Bobbi meets her in the middle and squeezes her hand, Melinda knows she made the right choice.

“Are you still willing to work with me?” she asks when Bobbi finally looks up, wiping her eyes. “I understand if you don’t. I’ll still give you a great reference letter even if you say no.”

Bobbi purses her lips but nods. “I can’t be your only accountability though, not when I work for you. Have they set you up with a group and a sponsor yet?”

Melinda nods. “I have a meeting the day after tomorrow where we will go over all of that. I wanted you to be there if you were still willing to work with me so that you would know all of it firsthand. Would you be okay with that?”

Bobbi nods, exhaling and squeezing Melinda’s hand again.

“Yeah. I want to be there for you in all the ways I can. But you’re going to need a lot more than me. It’s still a long road ahead.”

“I know. And I’m willing to walk it. But I think I’m finally ready to go home.”

~

She has a final counseling session on her last morning. Everything has been set up already—a sponsor back home, an NA/AA group, a system of accountability within her label and agency. They’ve talked about her lifestyle changes, a schedule, potentialities, delaying any tour plans for at least a year. Bobbi has been in charge of cleaning up all of her apartments, getting rid of any alcohol and leftover drugs before she gets there. Her bags are packed, now all that’s left is the work.

“These were undoubtedly some hard months,” Sharon reminds her, “but there are going to be more. When your resolve is tested, what are the first things you need to do?”

They’ve been over how to change her lifestyle, schedule, and circles in order to protect herself from a relapse, but Sharon has been intentional in reminding them all that they will not always be able to avoid temptation entirely. Together, they walk through her methods, her CBT training, and her options one more time.

“When will it stop being this hard?” Melinda asks before their time is up, one of her final questions.

Sharon offers her a compassionate smile. “You’re either going to be an alcoholic or a recovering alcoholic for the rest of your life, Melinda. There isn’t a finish line to this. You just get better and better at running the race. Every time you choose to take care of yourself instead of hurting yourself, it will get a little easier to choose that the next time. But this culture will be testing you until the end of your days, and you have to keep recommitting to pushing back.”

Sharon hugs her when their time is over. When Melinda follows her out the door, she’s surprised to see Kara sitting on the sofa. The woman’s dark eyes immediately flicker away, but Melinda looks back after she walks out of the office with Bobbi and sees Kara follow Sharon into her office.

~

Hunter is with Bobbi to pick her up that afternoon. There is a somber feeling in the air, and though Melinda knows she owes him an apology as well, she waits until they’re on her plane to make it. He is diplomatic, not digging at her any extra, but she can tell he appreciates her words too.

Their flight is mostly silent, as is the drive through Melinda’s quiet neighborhood in upstate New York. When they arrive, Bobbi walks through the house with her, making sure that everything is as she wanted it, that there was no leftover alcohol overlooked, and that Melinda is ready to be alone again. When she says goodbye at the door, Melinda hugs her and is surprised when Bobbi hugs her carefully back before she climbs back into the car with Hunter.

Alone at last, Melinda opens the door to her music room, hitting the buttons for the automatic curtains to part, letting daylight take over the room, glinting off the gold and platinum records on the walls. From her bag, she pulls out the notebook, one of her only physical souvenirs of the past three months, flipping through the pages until she finds the song she’s looking for.

She sits down at her piano and starts to play.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A blanket warning/apolgy--I have never been through rehab or addiction counseling in any capacity, so everything here is what I could research online+my own speculation and should not be considered sound counseling advice. If you or someone you know needs help with a situation like this, I discovered that most of the sites you google have a IM chat option for asking questions for yourself or someone else.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daisy and Melinda come face to face again, and there's a lot to catch up on.

It’s been five months since Isabelle Hartley became Daisy’s agent, and the new experiences just keep multiplying. First time in a real recording studio. First time playing with other musicians. First time hearing her own music professionally mixed. First time negotiating a recording deal. First time hearing herself on a radio. First time hearing people talk about her on the air.

First time signing a lease on an apartment.

First time opening a savings account.

First time buying furniture.

She’s in the middle now of recording the ninth song for the album, a record that has slowly come together throughout the past few months. Some of the songs are a few years old already, songs she’d written in harder times. A couple are more recent, from the wild ride of the past six months.

One song written on the whiteboard where she and the producers had mapped out the album a few weeks ago hasn’t been touched yet. They’d discussed it early on—as the song that put her on the map, “Shallow” really should be on the album. But Daisy had written it as a duet and debuted it with a certain person…and right now, it’s still hard to think about singing that song with anyone else.

Two of her other songs have already been released as singles. “Before I Cry” and “Heal Me.” The first time Daisy heard herself on the radio, she put her head down on the steering wheel and cried, then called Jemma to squeal with joy. The studio has been pushing her to get her album done as quickly as possible so that they can start manufacturing them in time for a January release date, and Daisy is happy to oblige.

Still, on most days it feels like she’s suffering from whiplash thanks to how quickly everything in her life has changed.

They’re on a break in between recording sessions and Daisy is eating her Jimmy John’s sandwich with one hand and scrolling Instagram with the other when she nearly drops both her lunch and her phone in reaction to a post.

Melinda May has updated her Instagram.

It’s a photo of a six-month sobriety chip lying in her palm—Daisy knows it’s Melinda’s hand by the trio of bird-silhouette tattoos that she has on her wrist and forearm. The caption beneath the photo is long, and Daisy sets her sandwich aside in order to hold her phone in two almost-trembling hands and read.

_**MelindaMay**  Six months._

_I know I’ve been quiet on social media for a while now, but I’m ready for everyone to know why. About a month after my tour ended, I checked into rehab for drug and alcohol addiction and spent three months doing one of the hardest things I’ve ever done—repeatedly saying no to something I used to love. I know I never would have made it through this process without the patience and encouragement of my bandmates and friends and the support and professional direction I’ve received through rehab. For anyone who is in a similar position, living your life taking orders from a substance, I really encourage you to reach out to others and then professionals for help—this is an impossible battle to fight alone._

_I’ve had plenty of time these past few months of course to be sitting at a piano or sitting alone with a pen, so I’ve got another, much happier announcement to share with you all in this post: new single dropping tomorrow. Album coming soon._

Daisy screenshots it all and sends it to Jemma, who texts back almost immediately.

_😱😱😱😱😱 **OMG, so that’s where she’s been! Well good for her. I’m glad she got help.**_

For some reason, Daisy doesn’t share the relief and excitement—in fact, she feels horribly uneasy about this news. She has to go back into the recording booth before she can decide how to respond to Jemma, and by the time she’s driving home that afternoon (in the sedan that she’s renting so that she can leave her obnoxious blue van in a garage and not be followed quite so much…), she’s able to process her reactions a little better.

It doesn’t quite make sense for her to feel upset about Melinda’s announcement, and yet, for some reason she does. It’s not that she doesn’t want Melinda to be doing better, right? Daisy’s been in her shoes before—getting clean is rotten work, and it means a lot to have made it six months without a relapse, especially on your first attempt to get clean. But as long as the woman had been dark on social media, it had been simpler to categorize why Daisy shouldn’t reach out to her.

_She’s not in a good spot and you don’t need to be around that._

_Things ended badly—no need to make them worse._

Izzy had cautioned her awhile back that there would be a little bit of legality to smooth out if Daisy recorded “Shallow” for her album—since the song had premiered at Melinda’s concert with her band and her vocals, there could be a little bit of a copyright battle if Melinda’s legal team didn’t capitulate easily. Daisy had been putting off recording the song for more than one reason—whether or not she wanted to record it with Melinda, they would have to cross paths eventually, if only for legal reasons.

_But no, you’re not upset just because she is suddenly around again and able to fight for a song if she chose to…_

_It’s because, if she is actually better…it suddenly makes things much less simple._

~

The next morning, Daisy wakes up (in an ­actual _bed_ that she _owns_ …) way too early and immediately grabs her phone, googling what’s sure to be big news already.

> **_Melinda May Releases New Single, Announces Album_ **
> 
> _The singer’s newest single, “Maybe It’s Time,” was released this morning…_

Daisy is already opening her streaming app. Before she gets up from her bed, she listens to the song five times on repeat.

> _“Maybe it's time to let the old ways die_
> 
> _Maybe it's time to let the old ways die_
> 
> _It takes a lot to change a girl_
> 
> _Hell, it takes a lot to try_
> 
> _Maybe it's time to let the old ways die_
> 
> _…_
> 
> _I'm glad I can't go back to where I came from_
> 
> _I'm glad those days are gone, gone for good_
> 
> _But if I could take spirits from my past and bring 'em here_
> 
> _You know I would…Know I would…”_

An hour later at the recording studio, Izzy is waiting for Daisy just inside the door.

“When do you want me to call her?”

~

Daisy doesn’t want Izzy to do the talking for her—Jemma has had Bobbi’s number since they met at the concert, and Daisy cautiously asks if she could send it to her. Daisy reaches out first via text message, and Bobbi easily agrees to a phone call.

“So are you still working with her?” Daisy cuts to the chase after the usual pleasantries have been exchanged.

“Yes. We had some hard discussions about what I will and won’t tolerate in the future, but I’m still working as her PA.”

“Has she really been sober?”

Daisy hates to be questioning Melinda’s authenticity—she knows that suspicion is a mule that makes mending fences pretty hard after recovery. But she also needs some reassurance that contacting the star again, after everything that she’s seen from her before, won’t just be a waste of time.

“She was in rehab for three months,” Bobbi answers patiently, “and I’m sure she was sober while she was there. If she hasn’t actually been sober since then, then she has done a kickass job of hiding it. But I really do think she’s holding steady. She’s been going to her group meetings and seeing her sponsor regularly …but that’s not what you really wanted to ask me, is it?”

Daisy takes a deep breath and fills Bobbi in on the progress of her record and the song she can’t make up her mind about.

“I’m worried,” she admits when her story arrives at the present moment. “Melinda wasn’t in a good place when we met, and we didn’t really part on good terms. What if being around me causes her to relapse?”

“I don’t think that’s very likely,” Bobbi says reassuringly, “but I would trust her judgment. If she thinks it’s fine for her to see you, then I wouldn’t fight her on it.”

“Before I went home from her tour, I kind of called her out on her drinking…” Daisy says slowly, unsure if Bobbi has already heard all this from Melinda. “I have a history with alcoholism myself; I lost a significant other to it in the past…and I told her I wasn’t willing to walk down that road again. And then I left. And I’ve just kind of wondered…”

She can’t let herself finish the sentence.

“I don’t think she got clean _for_ you,” Bobbi answers without making her say the rest. “But I do have a feeling that she finally did it at least partly _because_ of you. And that’s not nothing.”

The thought of this makes Daisy’s chest go tight. Resting her elbow on her knee, she curls forward, pressing the heel of her hand against one eye in order to hold back the tears for one more moment.

“If I asked her to come and record the song with me, do you think she would say yes?” she asks around the lump in her throat.

Bobbi sounds like she’s smiling. “I think there’s only one way to find out.”

~

As with many big decisions in her life, Daisy doesn’t feel like she can choose a direction without first at least talking to Jemma. She picks her friend up that evening in her van, they pick up burgers from the drive-through, and once they’re seated up on the luggage rack looking down from the mountain and out over the valley, Daisy spreads all the facts out between them.

“If it was just about the song, it would be an easy answer,” she sighs. “I love that song, I’m proud of that song, and I want it on my album. If she was any other big-name artist that I had a less complicated relationship with, there wouldn’t even be a question.”

“You know, just because you ask her to record it with you doesn’t mean she’s going to agree,” Jemma reminds her unnecessarily.

“But even if I record it by myself, or invite someone else to take the other part of the duet, she and I might run into legal trouble…”

“Would you rather meet her in private first and just…test the waters?” Jemma interrupts, and Daisy has a feeling her poor friend is getting a little tired of talking in circles about all this. “I think you know neither of us can predict how any of this will go before we see what she’s like sober. After all, you’ve never really met her that way.”

There was a time most of the people in Daisy’s life could have said the same thing. Jemma’s suggestion, in fact, seems to be the best choice.

~

She reaches out to Bobbi to set up the meeting, and their appointment is set for the Saturday afternoon of the following week—apparently Melinda lives on the other side of the country when she’s not touring.

Daisy tries not to read too much into the fact that the star is flying across the country to see her, not flying Daisy to her…

 _This isn’t a date,_ she reminds herself as she waits at a table in a café she couldn’t have afforded six months ago. _This is a business meeting…_

When Melinda walks in, Daisy recognizes her immediately, even with the woman’s large sunglasses and her hair ponytailed up under a baseball cap. She pauses just inside the door, looking around, and Daisy awkwardly stands, waiting nervously for Melinda to notice her.

The star’s face breaks into a smile as she catches sight of Daisy and pulls off her glasses, their eyes meeting as she approaches.

“Hi!” she says brightly as she reaches Daisy’s table. “It’s good to see you again.”

Daisy sticks out her hand to forego any uncertainty about whether they should hug. “Hi. It’s been a minute. You look great.”

She’s not even just being polite—sobriety is usually a good look on anyone. Melinda’s skin has a healthier glow, and it’s obvious that she’s lost some weight, though she doesn’t look malnourished. This most noticeable difference is in her eyes though—it feels to Daisy like it’s the first time she’s really seeing them.

“Thanks for agreeing to meet me,” Daisy says after a waitress has taken their order and disappeared. “I know you weren’t exactly in the neighborhood…”

“I’m happy to make the trip. It’s really good to see you.” Melinda’s smile seems genuine, and Daisy feels herself blush slightly.

“I uh, saw your Instagram post of course,” she goes on, waving her phone awkwardly as a prop. “I’m really glad to hear you’re doing so well. I know it must have been a rough six months…”

“You do know,” Melinda nods. “Were the first sixty days the worst part for you, too?”

“Physically? Yeah,” Daisy says with a nod. “No one warns you how your body has to re-learn how to fall asleep without depressants helping you along…”

“Oh my god, insomnia is the worst,” Melinda says, nodding.

It had not crossed Daisy’s mind until they were in the middle of sharing rehab stories that it might feel nice to talk to someone—anyone—who shared one of the most important experiences of her life. But shared suffering has a remarkable way of uniting people, and their exchanging of stories carry them all the way to the delivery of their lunches.

“So you’ve had a pretty big few months too, I’ve seen,” Melinda says after they’ve tucked into their sandwiches. “Couple of singles? I’m guessing an agent and a recording deal?”

“Yeah, it’s still pretty unbelievable,” Daisy says after swallowing her bite of chicken salad. “The album’s more than halfway done, but it probably won’t be released until February.”

“How does it feel?” Melinda says with a knowing look in her eye. “Dream come true?”

“Honestly, it doesn’t feel real most days. But you were right—I can afford an apartment now, at least.”

They share a smile, and Daisy realizes that this is the closest they’ve come yet to referencing their last conversation. She opens her mouth to change the subject, but Melinda gets ahead of her.

“I know the last time you saw me, I was in a pretty embarrassing place,” the woman says solemnly, holding Daisy’s gaze, “and I know this is coming awfully late, but I want to apologize for the way I acted that weekend.”

“It’s ok—”

“I also wanted to say thank you,” Melinda plows forward, still not looking away, “for calling it as you saw it.”

Daisy closes her mouth, barely breathing, and waits.

“You weren’t the first person in my life to say it, but you were the first person in a while that I hadn’t tuned out already. I didn’t want to hear it, but you said it anyway. I know that might have been scary, but I’m really thankful that you did.”

Daisy cautiously cracks a small smile. “I did the easy part—you did the work.”

“Maybe. But it eventually started because you didn’t back down. So thank you.”

Daisy looks away self-consciously, sighing in relief. “Like I said, I’m really glad you’re doing better. And now that you’re standing on the other side, you might have the chance to be that someone for another person someday. I never thought I would be, but here we are.”

“You’re my inspiration,” Melinda says with a cautious smile. “Six months was hard enough. Six years is a real victory.”

Daisy smiles. “Let me know when your one-year anniversary is coming up. I’d love to be there to celebrate with you.”

Melinda smiles wider, looking a little disarmed. “That would be great.”

They freeze there for a second, both equally unprepared for the moment, and Daisy can’t quite make herself look away.

“I’m really proud of you,” she repeats softly.

Melinda looks down. “Thank you.”

The spell is broken when their waitress reappears to top up their water glasses, and Daisy exhales, reaching for hers after it’s refilled.

“To six months,” she offers, raising her glass for a toast, “and to your new favorite drink.”

Melinda smiles gamely and touches her glasses to Daisy’s. “To six months and six years.”

“Seven now, actually,” Daisy admits after she takes a sip. She got a new chip last month.

“Wow! Good for you.”

“There’s something else I was hoping to talk to you about today, actually,” Daisy finally says, deciding she can’t put it off much longer. “I was kind of hoping to put ‘Shallow’ on my album—”

“And you wanted to talk copyright?”

Daisy takes a deep breath. “I wanted to ask if you’d be willing to record it with me.”

She hadn’t been sure until this moment that it was what she wanted to offer, but now she doesn’t second-guess her decision at all.

“Really?” Melinda says, her brows flying up. “For your album?”

Daisy nods. “Yeah. I want you on there, if you’re willing. You’re basically the reason any of this is happening.”

Melinda looks genuinely touched, smiling amazedly. “I’d love to. How soon do you need to get it done?”

“As soon as possible, really,” Daisy admits. “The studio really wants the record done by the end of the month. I know you said you’ve got a new album out soon, but do you think you might have some time—”

Melinda is already pulling out her phone. “Absolutely. Let me make some calls.”

~

Melinda extends her stay over the weekend and is at the studio when Daisy arrives on Monday. Everyone working seems equally excited to have Melinda there, and Daisy finds herself at ease rather than nervous to have a far more experienced singer in the booth with her. Melinda obviously knows her way around the recording process, and throughout the morning they work out some of the finer points of the guitar-piano duet that they never really had a chance to practice together. Melinda never grabs the reins, accommodating all of Daisy’s direction, but every suggestion she makes noticeably makes the song better. They fall into an easy rhythm, and time practically disappears as they work.

In the end, the recording only takes a single day, and Daisy finds that she’s just a little disappointed by that.

They sit on the couches listening to the playback that afternoon, and Daisy can’t stop sneaking glances at Melinda’s reactions throughout the song. When it’s over, they’re both grinning, and Melinda holds up her hand for a high-five.

“It’s such a good song,” she says for the dozenth time that day. “People are going to love it.”

Daisy is a little startled, but she smiles anyway. For a little while, she had forgotten that this song was for anyone but them.

When it’s time for Melinda to leave that evening, Daisy walks her out to her car, catching sight of Bobbi waiting within with the British man whose name Daisy has forgotten.

“Thanks again for being willing to record with me,” she says for the fifth time in the past hour, turning to Melinda with a smile. “I can’t believe we got it all done in one day.”

“I know. Almost a shame,” Melinda says with a smile that has become more relaxed throughout the weekend. “Can’t wait for the world to hear that song though—you sure wrote a good one.”

Before she can hesitate too long and miss the moment, Daisy closes the distance between them and pulls Melinda into a hug. “Thanks for coming out here,” she mutters over the woman’s shoulder. “Look me up if you’re ever out here again.”

“Absolutely,” Melinda says, hugging her back. “Let’s keep in touch, if it’s okay with you.”

When they part, Melinda smiles as she steps back, heading for her car, and Daisy notices that something about this feels very familiar.

A song, a car, a goodbye, a let’s-keep-in-touch…

When she gets back to her phone, still sitting on the piano in the recording booth, there’s one text waiting from a number that she had deleted in the past but now saves again.

No words. Just twelve music-note emojis.

~

That night, Daisy can’t quiet her thoughts enough to sleep, and she turns to her usual diversion in an effort to relax. In the darkness of her apartment, she strums her guitar, finding the right sounds to back the song forming in her mind, writing or singing the lyrics into her phone until the whole thing comes together decently. It’s closer to dawn than dusk when she finally lies down to sleep, curled around her phone with its nascent song and one unanswered text message within.

~

The next morning in the studio, she has bags under her eyes when she walks into the room with her producer.

“I have another song I want to add to the album.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm honestly not sure if there will be only one more chapter or two more, but I'm glad to finally get this one out! Thanks for supporting this story!


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